I don't know if it revolves so much around one genre of game anymore. DnD was the big game when it started (the con was started by TSR). Magic the Gathering was big. Now you can find plenty of pretty much any kind of game you want.
I've been doing LARPs for the last few years. The guy that runs the game I play wasn't there this year so I got into a Star Wars RPG. I'll probably do a lot more of the RPG since I had a blast.
There was a huge display for Axis and Allies this year and they seemed to run constantly (at least they had a huge crowd every time I walked past). They had a specific line to get your pass if you were there only for the Yu Gi Oh games (I think that's how it's spelled, never played it or paid much attention to it).
This is the third year it's been at Indy. It was in Milwaukee before that. With all the fests in Milwaukee during the summer it became increasingly difficult to book a hotel room. For a long time Gen-Con ran the same weekend as Irish Fest. Spend the day drinking and listening to bands at the fest, spend the night gaming at the Con. Sleep when you get home. Ah, to be young again.
Before Milwaukee I think it was at UW-Parkside and originated in Lake Geneva Wisconsin.
I've been going about 12 years now and have a friend that's been going since it was held in Lake Geneva.
Personally, although I like Milwaukee I'm starting to prefer Indy. We found out the first year there that thanks to the skyways between buildings you can go from your hotel to the Con to the mall to a resturant and then catch a Colts game and never have to see the day star.
My first video game at home was Pong. What was it, three settings? Tennis, handball, and hockey I think.
Being a second generation computer geek I did have punchcards to play with. Mom started as a keypunch operator back in the '60s and went up to Senior Programmer Analyst before she died last year. When I was a kid she'd bring home punchcards for me and I'd use them to build house-of-cards kind of stuff. Funny aside, when I went into the Army back in '87 I joined a computer unit. One of the first things they did when I got to the unit was to sit me down at the old keypunch machine and have me punch out a bunch of cards. Pretty much everything was on tape at that point but they had to keep cards "just in case". I told my current boss this story so he found a stack of cards for me. I keep 'em on my desk to confuse the young 'uns.:)
On one hand SBC has been refusing to turn up DSL in my area specifically because they've been waiting for this to happen. The hardware was in place and going through "final testing" five years ago when we first moved in. I heard this from both SBC and the town's tech guru. So if this goes through then maybe they'll finally turn us up and I can get off of dial-up.
One the other hand, do I want SBC to have more of a monopoly then they already have?
It wouldn't effect me so much because SBC is my carrier for local, long distance, and cell phone anyway but the libertarian in me hates the idea of having no choice and nowhere to go if SBC ever pisses me off.
Of course if WiMax or whatever new technology takes off in my area so I can get broadband without going over a phone line I would cancel my landline anyway. I've been trying to get my wife used to the idea that calling long-distance over the landline when she's got 1500-some anytime minutes + free nights and weekends on her cell is a waste of money. So far her long distance calls have fallen under our regular package so haven't been costing extra but her brother is moving his family halfway across the country in a couple of weeks so that could change.
I have a flag on my credit report with the three major agencies. Basically I put a sentence in the report stating that I have been the victim of identity theft in the past and any request for credit using my name or SSN must be verified by a call to my home number. It didn't cost me anything.
Oh, and as far as I've ever been able to find my name and SSN were sold after I applied for my passport at the post office. That was the only place I had given my SSN in years and the theft occured within days of that. I couldn't prove anything and the cops wouldn't investigate even though I gave them the address that the fraudulent credit card was sent to (it was listed as a "recent address" on my credit report and I was able to get a verification of the address from the credit card company).
It would be nice if there was a class which devoted equal time to all faiths.
The community college I went to had a "Philosophy of Religion" class that's about as close to this as you can get. Throughout the semester the teacher brought in people to discuss their various religions or lack thereof.
He even brought in that kook Rob Sherman to discuss the "atheist point of view". R.S. is the type of atheist that makes the rest of us look bad. Just another sue-happy lawyer with an agenda. I feel about him like I imagine a serious non-pushy Christian like some that have posted here today must feel about televangelists. Unfortunately he's local and well known so gets asked back every semester (at least he had been coming to the class for several years before I took it).
I see this all the time in the local (Chicago area) want ads. There are always "Entry Level" jobs with descriptions requiring five years of experience.
As for the junior position increasing responsibility, I can vouch for that. In my first pro job I started as a PC tech. Within a few months I was taking on a lot of what was considered the Network Administrator's job, account maintenance, setting up network printers and queues, installing and upgrading servers, running cable, maintaining wiring closets, etc. Once I was comfortable with that job the two Net Admins got promoted to Network Engineers (a new position that was created just for them). They got the pay increase to go with the promotion, I got left with the title (and salary) of a PC Tech but was handling all of the Net Admin tasks.
I did learn a ton of stuff there and am glad that I had the opportunity but it would have been nice to have the salary to go with it. Heck, I might have stayed if the pay had been better even though the director was a pain to work for.
What works for you might not work for someone else. I've also got fair skin. Your meager tan might protect you all summer. Me, no such luck. I somewhat seriously joke that I don't tan, I just turn various shades of red in the summer if I'm not protected. I've had sun poisoning twice in my life. Both times were when I was a young kid in the Army. Outside in the sun all day, every day for weeks on end. I've always been active outdoors so this wasn't exactly new to me. One day, no different from other days I wake up with a serious problem. The following summer the same thing happened. I've been real careful about my sun exposure ever since. I'm still outside a lot but take steps like using shade to my advantage, covering up with clothing or hats, or as a last resort, use sunscreen.
I had an appointment with a dermatologist a couple of weeks ago for an unrelated issue. She inspected me head to toe and told me she was suprised that someone at my age (35) with such pale skin had never had any problems, especially since I had the sun poisoning twice.
This is something that I finally got my wife to understand, in any given year there is only a small handful of movies that you *have* to see in the theater the first time. For example, Lord of the Rings. On the other hand, there are a whole lot more of "wait until it's out on DVD" movies. For example, oh, any chick-flick ever made.
The bonus to this is by the time they come out on DVD she's usually forgotten about the "must see" chick-flick-du-jour. Even if she remembers she usually waits for a time when I'm not home to watch them. A winning strategy all around.
Another thing that hasn't really been happening with the parks lately is crosspromotion. They have an amazing chance to advertise for the park in the theaters and on DVDs for all of their stuff, but as far as I've seen, they don't ever do that. They need more movie tie-ins with the park, and they need to keep it relevant.
They might not advertise the parks in their movies (I can't remember the last Disney movie I saw so really can't say) but every show on the Disney-owned tv channel (ABC?) seems to have their characters make a trip to Disney Land/World. I don't watch much network tv but everytime I land on an ABC show the plot seems to be that whatever family wins an all expenses paid trip. Or in the case of the game shows, the final show of the season is being taped "Live From The Magic Kingdom".
I'm not too familar with the modern punk. I was more into the Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys punk era. Back in the 80's and 90's I was more into metal then punk so it wasn't unusual for me to have mix tapes of Slayer to Devorak to Anthrax to Bach, etc.
Come to think of it that's not too different from what's in my CD changer these days although I'm listening to more 70's classic rock because there isn't a decent heavy station in my area but there's a ton of "hard rock" stations claiming to be duking it out over who plays more of the "heavy" stuff. Based on what I'm hearing the yardstick that they use is who plays more Pink Floyd songs per day. (sigh) I'm sorry guys, "Young Lust" (Floyd) to "Honky Tonk Woman" (Stones) to "L.A. Woman" (Doors) and then following with the occasional Offspring song does not a "hard" station make...
Speaking of reading the labels, have you ever read the label on a can of "Slim Fast"? Drink a Pepsi, pop a multi-vitamin, about the same sugar content.
Then there was the time that the place I was working out at was giving away "healthy" soup that some vendor gave them. Reading the label one serving had 100% of the RDA for sodium. Guess you're screwed on sodium for the rest of the day.:)
I agree. I recently bought an HP nx9600 for one of my engineers. He needed something that could run Solidworks and something he could take home on weekends and on the occasional trip to a customer site. He likes the screen so much he's done away with the 19" CRT that he used with his last laptop.
I live in a suburb of Chicago. All the lines are owned by SBC. If they ever decide to activate DSL in my town then there will be competition between DSL companies. According to the town officials that's exactly why SBC refuses to turn us up. I was told by the town tech guy and SBC's sales department that the hardware was in place five years ago (when phone service came to this area so long ago it was decided that all the surrounding towns would be served by one CO, which we are of course too far from. There's supposed to be a local substation in our town that was built a few years back that is currently sitting dark).
So my choice right now is dial-up or overpriced Comcast.
When my wife was pregnant I spent some time on the Consumer Reports site trying to find reviews of baby things like carseats, cribs, etc. It seemed that everything I wanted to look at was by subscription only so I paid for it. The by subscription only articles and reviews were all three to fives years old. With all the recalls three years for baby products in an eternity so I didn't get a lot of good information. Heck, they even tell you on their site not to buy a three year old carseat because there's probably been a recall in that time. I used what little I got from CR as a starting point then spent a lot of time on other sites researching. I kept the subscription for the year and then just canceled the auto-renew at the end of the year.
Funny thing, I went to clean out my spam-trap a couple of weeks ago. There was something like 12 e-mails there from CR basically telling me that obviously my canceling was a mistake because with all the great info I was missing out on I would have to be nuts to cancel.
I never blocked them personally so I guess something in the message or address triggered it as spam on my provider's end.
Not so funny, if you have a bullet from a crime scene and a test bullet fired from a known gun and the markings match then you have a very good chance that the crime scene bullet was shot from that gun.
The problem with registering with a database is that once you have a gun a few minutes with a file can totally change the markings on bullets fired from that particular gun making it impossible to match to the database.
Now your average gun owner isn't going to go around filing the bore of his guns to change it's "fingerprint" but any criminal would.
Heck, you don't even need to file the bore to make it change. After being used for any length of time the barrel's characteristics can change on their own due to the heating and cooling of the metal.
I loved it as a short story but as a book it just didn't work for me. He just seemed to ramble on into nothing. It just became a typical "End of the World" story, well, end of life as we know it anyway. That and the fact that even the novel version was only a 90 minute read makes it seem to me that he really didn't have much else to say.
I've liked a couple other of his novels that I've read. Perhaps if I hadn't read the short story first (several times) I would have appreciated the novel version more...
I would immediately migrate my users to Dvorak keyboards. Nice way to fix the PEBCAK errors. CTRL-K a couple of users, spike their heads outside my cube as a warning to the others. Now that's a pleasant thought for a Friday morning.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a good thing I don't have mod points this week. I can't decided if this is Funny, Insightfull, or just a bad pun...
I'm all for it as well. Just make sure that Barbra Streisand's house isn't in your picture. :)
http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/features/bsphotos/
I don't know if it revolves so much around one genre of game anymore. DnD was the big game when it started (the con was started by TSR). Magic the Gathering was big. Now you can find plenty of pretty much any kind of game you want.
I've been doing LARPs for the last few years. The guy that runs the game I play wasn't there this year so I got into a Star Wars RPG. I'll probably do a lot more of the RPG since I had a blast.
There was a huge display for Axis and Allies this year and they seemed to run constantly (at least they had a huge crowd every time I walked past). They had a specific line to get your pass if you were there only for the Yu Gi Oh games (I think that's how it's spelled, never played it or paid much attention to it).
This is the third year it's been at Indy. It was in Milwaukee before that. With all the fests in Milwaukee during the summer it became increasingly difficult to book a hotel room. For a long time Gen-Con ran the same weekend as Irish Fest. Spend the day drinking and listening to bands at the fest, spend the night gaming at the Con. Sleep when you get home. Ah, to be young again.
Before Milwaukee I think it was at UW-Parkside and originated in Lake Geneva Wisconsin.
I've been going about 12 years now and have a friend that's been going since it was held in Lake Geneva.
Personally, although I like Milwaukee I'm starting to prefer Indy. We found out the first year there that thanks to the skyways between buildings you can go from your hotel to the Con to the mall to a resturant and then catch a Colts game and never have to see the day star.
My first video game at home was Pong. What was it, three settings? Tennis, handball, and hockey I think.
:)
Being a second generation computer geek I did have punchcards to play with. Mom started as a keypunch operator back in the '60s and went up to Senior Programmer Analyst before she died last year. When I was a kid she'd bring home punchcards for me and I'd use them to build house-of-cards kind of stuff. Funny aside, when I went into the Army back in '87 I joined a computer unit. One of the first things they did when I got to the unit was to sit me down at the old keypunch machine and have me punch out a bunch of cards. Pretty much everything was on tape at that point but they had to keep cards "just in case". I told my current boss this story so he found a stack of cards for me. I keep 'em on my desk to confuse the young 'uns.
Then there's my favorite beverage made from said insect vomit. I'm thinking about trying to make a batch myself this fall.
I've got mixed feelings about this.
On one hand SBC has been refusing to turn up DSL in my area specifically because they've been waiting for this to happen. The hardware was in place and going through "final testing" five years ago when we first moved in. I heard this from both SBC and the town's tech guru. So if this goes through then maybe they'll finally turn us up and I can get off of dial-up.
One the other hand, do I want SBC to have more of a monopoly then they already have?
It wouldn't effect me so much because SBC is my carrier for local, long distance, and cell phone anyway but the libertarian in me hates the idea of having no choice and nowhere to go if SBC ever pisses me off.
Of course if WiMax or whatever new technology takes off in my area so I can get broadband without going over a phone line I would cancel my landline anyway. I've been trying to get my wife used to the idea that calling long-distance over the landline when she's got 1500-some anytime minutes + free nights and weekends on her cell is a waste of money. So far her long distance calls have fallen under our regular package so haven't been costing extra but her brother is moving his family halfway across the country in a couple of weeks so that could change.
I have a flag on my credit report with the three major agencies. Basically I put a sentence in the report stating that I have been the victim of identity theft in the past and any request for credit using my name or SSN must be verified by a call to my home number. It didn't cost me anything.
Oh, and as far as I've ever been able to find my name and SSN were sold after I applied for my passport at the post office. That was the only place I had given my SSN in years and the theft occured within days of that. I couldn't prove anything and the cops wouldn't investigate even though I gave them the address that the fraudulent credit card was sent to (it was listed as a "recent address" on my credit report and I was able to get a verification of the address from the credit card company).
It would be nice if there was a class which devoted equal time to all faiths.
The community college I went to had a "Philosophy of Religion" class that's about as close to this as you can get. Throughout the semester the teacher brought in people to discuss their various religions or lack thereof.
He even brought in that kook Rob Sherman to discuss the "atheist point of view". R.S. is the type of atheist that makes the rest of us look bad. Just another sue-happy lawyer with an agenda. I feel about him like I imagine a serious non-pushy Christian like some that have posted here today must feel about televangelists. Unfortunately he's local and well known so gets asked back every semester (at least he had been coming to the class for several years before I took it).
I see this all the time in the local (Chicago area) want ads. There are always "Entry Level" jobs with descriptions requiring five years of experience.
As for the junior position increasing responsibility, I can vouch for that. In my first pro job I started as a PC tech. Within a few months I was taking on a lot of what was considered the Network Administrator's job, account maintenance, setting up network printers and queues, installing and upgrading servers, running cable, maintaining wiring closets, etc. Once I was comfortable with that job the two Net Admins got promoted to Network Engineers (a new position that was created just for them). They got the pay increase to go with the promotion, I got left with the title (and salary) of a PC Tech but was handling all of the Net Admin tasks.
I did learn a ton of stuff there and am glad that I had the opportunity but it would have been nice to have the salary to go with it. Heck, I might have stayed if the pay had been better even though the director was a pain to work for.
What works for you might not work for someone else. I've also got fair skin. Your meager tan might protect you all summer. Me, no such luck. I somewhat seriously joke that I don't tan, I just turn various shades of red in the summer if I'm not protected. I've had sun poisoning twice in my life. Both times were when I was a young kid in the Army. Outside in the sun all day, every day for weeks on end. I've always been active outdoors so this wasn't exactly new to me. One day, no different from other days I wake up with a serious problem. The following summer the same thing happened. I've been real careful about my sun exposure ever since. I'm still outside a lot but take steps like using shade to my advantage, covering up with clothing or hats, or as a last resort, use sunscreen.
I had an appointment with a dermatologist a couple of weeks ago for an unrelated issue. She inspected me head to toe and told me she was suprised that someone at my age (35) with such pale skin had never had any problems, especially since I had the sun poisoning twice.
Woody Allen was interesting? When?
This is something that I finally got my wife to understand, in any given year there is only a small handful of movies that you *have* to see in the theater the first time. For example, Lord of the Rings. On the other hand, there are a whole lot more of "wait until it's out on DVD" movies. For example, oh, any chick-flick ever made.
The bonus to this is by the time they come out on DVD she's usually forgotten about the "must see" chick-flick-du-jour. Even if she remembers she usually waits for a time when I'm not home to watch them. A winning strategy all around.
Another thing that hasn't really been happening with the parks lately is crosspromotion. They have an amazing chance to advertise for the park in the theaters and on DVDs for all of their stuff, but as far as I've seen, they don't ever do that. They need more movie tie-ins with the park, and they need to keep it relevant.
They might not advertise the parks in their movies (I can't remember the last Disney movie I saw so really can't say) but every show on the Disney-owned tv channel (ABC?) seems to have their characters make a trip to Disney Land/World. I don't watch much network tv but everytime I land on an ABC show the plot seems to be that whatever family wins an all expenses paid trip. Or in the case of the game shows, the final show of the season is being taped "Live From The Magic Kingdom".
I'm not too familar with the modern punk. I was more into the Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys punk era. Back in the 80's and 90's I was more into metal then punk so it wasn't unusual for me to have mix tapes of Slayer to Devorak to Anthrax to Bach, etc.
Come to think of it that's not too different from what's in my CD changer these days although I'm listening to more 70's classic rock because there isn't a decent heavy station in my area but there's a ton of "hard rock" stations claiming to be duking it out over who plays more of the "heavy" stuff. Based on what I'm hearing the yardstick that they use is who plays more Pink Floyd songs per day. (sigh) I'm sorry guys, "Young Lust" (Floyd) to "Honky Tonk Woman" (Stones) to "L.A. Woman" (Doors) and then following with the occasional Offspring song does not a "hard" station make...
Silly, because he doesn't have $3 million.
Speaking of reading the labels, have you ever read the label on a can of "Slim Fast"? Drink a Pepsi, pop a multi-vitamin, about the same sugar content.
:)
Then there was the time that the place I was working out at was giving away "healthy" soup that some vendor gave them. Reading the label one serving had 100% of the RDA for sodium. Guess you're screwed on sodium for the rest of the day.
I agree. I recently bought an HP nx9600 for one of my engineers. He needed something that could run Solidworks and something he could take home on weekends and on the occasional trip to a customer site. He likes the screen so much he's done away with the 19" CRT that he used with his last laptop.
I live in a suburb of Chicago. All the lines are owned by SBC. If they ever decide to activate DSL in my town then there will be competition between DSL companies. According to the town officials that's exactly why SBC refuses to turn us up. I was told by the town tech guy and SBC's sales department that the hardware was in place five years ago (when phone service came to this area so long ago it was decided that all the surrounding towns would be served by one CO, which we are of course too far from. There's supposed to be a local substation in our town that was built a few years back that is currently sitting dark).
So my choice right now is dial-up or overpriced Comcast.
When my wife was pregnant I spent some time on the Consumer Reports site trying to find reviews of baby things like carseats, cribs, etc. It seemed that everything I wanted to look at was by subscription only so I paid for it. The by subscription only articles and reviews were all three to fives years old. With all the recalls three years for baby products in an eternity so I didn't get a lot of good information. Heck, they even tell you on their site not to buy a three year old carseat because there's probably been a recall in that time. I used what little I got from CR as a starting point then spent a lot of time on other sites researching. I kept the subscription for the year and then just canceled the auto-renew at the end of the year.
Funny thing, I went to clean out my spam-trap a couple of weeks ago. There was something like 12 e-mails there from CR basically telling me that obviously my canceling was a mistake because with all the great info I was missing out on I would have to be nuts to cancel.
I never blocked them personally so I guess something in the message or address triggered it as spam on my provider's end.
Not so funny, if you have a bullet from a crime scene and a test bullet fired from a known gun and the markings match then you have a very good chance that the crime scene bullet was shot from that gun.
The problem with registering with a database is that once you have a gun a few minutes with a file can totally change the markings on bullets fired from that particular gun making it impossible to match to the database.
Now your average gun owner isn't going to go around filing the bore of his guns to change it's "fingerprint" but any criminal would.
Heck, you don't even need to file the bore to make it change. After being used for any length of time the barrel's characteristics can change on their own due to the heating and cooling of the metal.
I loved it as a short story but as a book it just didn't work for me. He just seemed to ramble on into nothing. It just became a typical "End of the World" story, well, end of life as we know it anyway. That and the fact that even the novel version was only a 90 minute read makes it seem to me that he really didn't have much else to say.
I've liked a couple other of his novels that I've read. Perhaps if I hadn't read the short story first (several times) I would have appreciated the novel version more...
I would immediately migrate my users to Dvorak keyboards. Nice way to fix the PEBCAK errors. CTRL-K a couple of users, spike their heads outside my cube as a warning to the others. Now that's a pleasant thought for a Friday morning.
I meant to say pop-ups/unders. That's what I get for not previewing. I haven't seen a pop-under in ages either.
Odd, I visit Drudge once or twice a day and haven't seen a pop-up in ages.