Blue Sparks

We have started our new Warhammer campaign as of February 17th, and we are now gearing up for our second installment on Sunday. I’ve always enjoyed playing low level characters since they are, for the most part, goons. Even better in the Warhammer world is the fact that most players start of in menial careers which have nothing to do with adventuring! We start off as normal people with normal (medieval) careers and as the situation progresses we evolve into our real characters. For example, my last character started off as a Pharmacist, basically an apothecary, then advanced into the Physician career, the field doctor for our party, and was planning on become a deadly assassin by using his mastery of the body, disease and poison.

My current character is an outlaw. It is more of an adventuring career than most at the start, but he is about the only one. Other characters in our group include a pugilist, a tomb robber, an apprenctice priest of justic, a rune smith (dwarven magic enchanter) apprentice, and a fast talking thief (I am not certain on this character yet since he hasn’t joined yet). Everyone is in rather basic careers and are just normal people, if you can call warhammer people normal.

The idea that we start off as snotlings (a warhammer reference, but you should be able to pick it up in context) rather than in an archetype of Rogue, Wizard, Cleric, or Warrior in the D&D world adds an extra level of depth to the game. At least that is how most of us feel while we’re playing Warhammer. Many of us were previously avid D&D players, but have since dropped the habit. Don’t get me wrong, we all still enjoy AD&D (2nd Edition. Death to 3/3.5E) but the characteristics of the WFRP world and the gameplay make it so very interesting.

Anyway, while I’m talking about Warhammer I remembered this Penny-Arcade comic about Warhammer Online from last year:

Penny-Arcade Warhammer Comic

We’re glad that at least one other person enjoys Warhammer as much as we do!

We have finally finished the Warhammer campaign that I have been playing in for the last year and 4 or 5 months. I can’t recall if I started playing in August or September 2005. Unfortunately we were down two players which doesn’t give me a good feeling about the end.

I have definitely learned some lessons from this first campaign though. I certainly know a career NOT to start off in for our next session. Although my Dwarven physician has helped the party heal he was more useful as a fighter being a strong and sturdy Dwarf. The problem stems from the fact he started off being a physician and didn’t mature out of the career until nearly end-game.

Our last session was filled with zany capers, as is usual for our group. I do believe this is directly proportional to the fact there is no good and evil in the Warhammer world. There is “Chaos” and then there is everybody else. Our characters did not suffer the shackles of alignment but were spiteful, petty, and out for themselves. Although everyone was thinking “me” first and foremost we could still work well as a group when the time came. Sounds a lot like the real world, doesn’t it?

For example, I learned a particular party member had a ring of regeneration for many sessions and had told nobody about it. What use is my physician in the presence of such an item? C’est la vie, I must say. The item did save us when a Halfling jumped out of a tree while shapeshifing into an elephant in order to crush a monster. Yes, the monster died but he broke four limbs in the process. All of this happened while the three of us split from the main group and went travelling down a forgotten trail without telling anyone and without any supplies.

In the end, exactly what we thought was going to happen to us did happen: we were betrayed. The good “doctor”, and by doctor I mean professor, was really a follower of Chaos and sacrificed several of our red shirts, er “crew”, to his master in order to bring it to life. The doctor was easily slain at this point, and then we had a giant battle with an ancient evil elf queen.

As I said before, we were down two people. One had died a few sessions before after an interparty squabble and decided not to return. Quite understandable. The other party member, our sole (real) fighter, was unable to make it due to the superbowl. In their abscence the GM allowed the Halfling to summon elementals and did not have the boss lady dismiss them. This meant they took most of the hits, and did most of the damage. It helped, for sure, but it took away from a lot of the feeling of victory. We didn’t defeat her, it was the elementals.

Oh well! Time to make new characters. I have one made already and I do believe I will be making a backup. I’ll talk more about them some other time.

I believed the ODE exam was behind me. I thought it was finished, I really did. Well, it turns out it has not for it is nearing the middle of February and I still do not have my final marks for this class. Inconceivable!!!!

After contacting the school to find out what the issue is, I received a response a scant day later. It seems the exam invigilator I used forgot to sign off on my exam. Yes, the people I pay money to let me sit in their little cubicle for 3 hours forgot to fill out their names and sign my test.

This whole exam has turned into a nightmare that will not quit. I think I fail, I think I pass, I can’t get a final grade, and without a final grade I can’t get money back from work. It’s driving me insane!!!

When I heard about the iPhone last week I was, at first, quite excited. It seemed like the next BIG THING, but I’ve been doing a little more research lately… I’m not exactly impressed any more. 4GB or 8GB memory, what the hell? I’ve got a 30GB iPod, and there is now 80GB versions out there. Why would I get a phone which only has 8GB, especially if the cost is going to be 500 USD!

I really thought the iPhone would be very interesting at first glance. Now it seems like a crippled iPod with a phone built in, but it costs 4x as much. Awesome.

Somehow I pulled off a 62 on my ODE exam. I have to say it was the hardest exam I have ever written in my life and I was nowhere near as prepared for it as I thought I was. The course is done, and now it’s on to focusing on Discrete Mathematics and Database Management.

Passed the operating systems course with an 88. The verdict is still out on the ODE course.

I am writing this with my two 20″ widescreen monitors though. Makes me happy no matter what happens with the exam

So, I had two exams this week. One for my “Operating System Concepts” class, which I believe went fairly smoothly. The other, was Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE), which I think went, uh… not so well.

In all honesty, there just wasn’t enough time to get everything done. Most likely because I didn’t do enough of the problems from the earlier sections of the course. The recent items I had almost no problems with (2nd order ODEs, power series solutions, and the method of frobenius).

I haven’t decided yet if I will rewrite (if I fail). I probably should, but the thought of writing that exam again makes me shudder. We’ll see how it goes I guess…

As I promised yesterday, I have packaged together the gallery copy/resize script for anyone else’s use. And, as an added bonus I have also included the script I use for decoding EXIF data and caching it to a file, which can save your gallery from having to generate the data on demand.

Both scripts are released under the GNU GPL. I would have liked to release the decoder script under the LGPL, but the PEL library is GPL so there’s no choice in the matter. C’est la vie, so they say.

Well, the gallery is all shrunk… 468 MB in total for 4137 pictures. That includes version control data (so I can easily plop new pictures in and download them), thumbnails, and the decoded photo meta data.

Not too shabby I guess..

Oh! It should also run faster… it seems that even though there was code to check if the meta data was already decoded so it didn’t do it again, it wasn’t working. The path was wrong, so it just kept trying to decode again and again. It didn’t actually decode anything before because there was a secondary check, but the overhead of calling the script was really slowing things down.

Just thought I’d post this comment from Darryl after the old gallery was removed:

<WerkinSsa> disk space usage dropped by 10%
<WerkinSsa> good work

That’s, uh, significant.