Places Where It’s Probably Okay to Not Have Too Much Halloween Spirit
Gate G12, O’Hare Airport, Chicago.
I’m back in Springfield.
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Gate G12, O’Hare Airport, Chicago.
I’m back in Springfield.
Step One: Read all of Metamorpho’s dialogue in Troy McClure’s voice.
I brought a suitcase with me that was much larger than I really needed, but that was so I could tote along some games! Last night Dave and I went over to Brian’s and played games with him, Topher, and Ben. We started out with For Sale, which lived up to its reputation as “gamer crack”. Then a little bit of “No Thanks!” (Z-Man Games edition available at the Dragon’s Pile for $10). After that I introduced them to the wonders of Power Grid and they all liked it, which was good because I wasn’t really in the mood to eat that game at that time. We then finished out with Mission: Red Planet, which was another hit. It was nice to see my gaming buddies again, and we had a good time. I didn’t get to teach Brian Tigris and Euphrates, though. I’ll have to do that next time.
Then today Dave and I played Sword and Skull, a game that’s pretty vilified on BoardGameGeek, but actually isn’t too bad. Although it’s decried as “Pirate Monopoly” it actually reminded me of the classic game Talisman more than anything else. We then played Battle Cry, the first game in Richard Borg’s “Command and Colors” system (along with Memoir ‘44, Command and Colors: Ancients, and the soon-to-be-released BattleLore). I’m not a fan of wargames or the Civil War or anything, but I really did like it. My dislike of miniatures and wargames is based on my inability to look at a whole grand picture and develop a giant strategy, but Battle Cry sliced up the board into easier (for me) to handle bits.
But it hasn’t been all games, no sir. I’ve also been having a cold, grousing about politics with Dave and Vicky, watching the Hellboy animated movie, and this evening I went and saw John play at open mic night at the Potbelly. He did five songs and sounded really good on all of them, though his daughter Emma really wanted him to play the Pajama Song.
Tomorrow I go back to work and then Tuesday I head on back to Massachusetts. This is the kind of business trip I could definitely get used to.
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Legomancer
Hey, I’m in Champaign-Urbana Illinois! My work flew me out here to our main office to get some SQL schoolin’ from some of our database gurus. Now I know all about joins and decodes, about optimization and ERDs, about indexes and subqueries! I’m SQLing with delight!
(Do you know what SQL stands for? If you said “Standard Query Language”, O’Reilly books says you’re a doggone liar and it really stands for nothing!)
Travelling on a plane for business purposes makes me a “Road Warrior”, one of those ambitious go-getters that in-flight magazines are written for. Alas, I didn’t spend my flight balancing my data parameters or analyzing my customer throughput or cross-indexing my sales projections; I read comic books.
Now, normally work-related meetings on database structures are the sort of things that reward themselves, but in addition to being able to gain some serious knowledge and hang with my normally IM-based co-workers, I’m also staying with Dave and Vicky, and tomorrow I’ll be seeing some of my old gaming buddies. I’ll even get to stop into the Dragon’s Pile!
It’s a good thing I’m having a good time, too, considering what utter hell the flight over here was. In brief: nothing was coming into or going out of Chicago for several hours yesterday, and traveling from Springfield, MA to C-U, IL, took almost ten hours.
Becky and Beebo are holding down the fort at home. I’ve put Beebo in charge while I was away.
That hum you heard on Sunday evening was the sound of thousands of non-UK Doctor Who fans bittorrenting the first episodes of Torchwood, the first spinoff show from the new series (and the second spinoff show from Doctor Who ever). BBC Three debuted the show with two episodes back-to-back. My thoughts are behind the break so as to avoid spoilers.
