Home Made Haiku
September 30, 2009
home made ice cream cake
is clearly five syllables
but how many words?
A Game and a Game and…
September 29, 2009
Blokus has one of my favorite qualities in a game: the rules are simple, the decisions less so. I played it yesterday for the first time in years, with my almost-six daughter, her similarly-aged friend, and my three-year-old son.
Well, Max, didn’t make all his own decisions. When his turn came round, he chose one of the pieces in his color, and I chose where on the board to place it. Yesterday was a landmark in his game-playing development in that he seemed to understand and respect the concept of waiting for one’s turn.
So what do you do on your turn? You place one of your pieces on the board so that it touches one of your previously-played pieces at one or more corners. It may not touch another of your pieces along an edge. It may touch another player’s piece. You start the game by placing one of your pieces in an empty corner of the square board.
The game ends for you when you cannot legally place any of your pieces. The game ends altogether when no player can play. The aim is to get all your pieces onto the board. Failing that, you do well to be left with only a few small pieces unplayed.
The photos show a four-player game going from first moves to what I’d consider the end of the opening (or the start of the middle game, as the players meet in the middle of the board) to game end. They show how colorful and attractive the board becomes as the game develops. The visual appeal, along with the simple rules, makes this a good kid/family game.
If, after reading the above, you’re interested in buying Blokus or games like it, you have several broad options. One is to buy it from an online game store. I think I bought my copy from Funagain, where Blokus is currently on sale for $20.
I’m glad to say that Blokus and games like it are more widely played and sold than they were when I was doing a lot of game-buying. New online game stores, such as GameSurplus, have sprung up.
I should apologize for my parochial bias in linking only to USA-based sites. But instead I’ll become yet more parochial in linking to a few stores near Roslindale (and hence near Maddie’s friend Hannah). Eureka! is a good puzzle and game store in Brookline. Near Eureka in Coolidge Corner is the toy store Magic Beans, and nearer to us, in Jamaica Plain, is the toy store Boing! I think I’ve seen Blokus in each of them, although I’m more sure about Beans than about Boing.
Then, to return to online retail, there’s always Amazon. The selection of games there is a lot better than I’d have expected (and found) a few years ago. Amazon even has a video promoting Blokus.
Blokus is an example of a game that’s been successful, and has been part of the wider increase in interest in board games. That wider change is worth a post of its own, and will probably get one soon. But right now, I’ll remain specific to Blokus, and remark that there’s a series of Blokus games.
There’s the smaller version, called Blokus Travel or Blokus Duo depending on the edition. (It’s currently available at Eureka! and at the online retailers mentioned above.) There’s Blokus Trigon, and… but you can go to the official Blokus website and find out more.
In closing, Blokus is excellent as a family game, or as a light filler for groups who usually lean toward heavier games. The basic game strikes me as best with its maximum number of 4 players, but I’ve heard positive reports of it for fewer.
Real Estate Opening
September 28, 2009
Our Boston apartment is now really on the market. Yesterday (Sunday) saw the first open house. It was a rainy day, which we thought might cause people to stay at home rather than to go out househunting. But our agents informed us that levels of attendance and of serious interest were encouraging. Perhaps the rain only deters the hobbyist houselookers (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
The apartment became a little less tidy during the afternoon, when our daughter had a friend over. It’ll get tidier again tomorrow (Tuesday) when there is a showing. Thereafter, we’ll try to keep the place in a state such that it’s ready to show at short notice.
This post in the Real Estate Ramblings series follows from the pilot post.
Real Estate Ramblings: Pilot
September 24, 2009
Real Estate Ramblings (RER) is a new series. This is the pilot post/episode, in which the plot is set in motion, and the main characters introduced.
The plot concerns a move from Boston to Washington DC. Three of the main plot strands are: selling property in Boston; buying property in, or near, DC; and the actual move.
The family on the move provides four of the main characters:
- Pack Dog, one of the parents, who tends to hoard stuff. PD would be called Pack Rat were it not for RER’s use of Chinese astrology, whereby each character’s name includes the animal of birth year.
- Minimalist Pig, the other parent, who sees the move as an opportunity to shed ugly excess possessions.
- Lovable Lamb, the older of the two kids, and the big sister of…
- Playful Puppy, the youngest member of the family. His parents hope that he will be out of diapers before the move: PP himself isn’t making any promises.
Other key characters include the agents. Roger Johnson is helping with the purchase a house in the DC area.
Ellen Grubert and Janis Lippman are the agents for the sale of the Boston property. To be more specific, the property is a condo in Boston’s friendliest neighborhood, and here’s the condo’s page at E&J’s site.
The frame from the pilot episode shows PP marveling at what he sees as the sudden arrival of a huge and mysterious box. We’ll learn more about this box during the RER season. Stay tuned!
Bank Account: Story of a Mini-Bailout
September 20, 2009
We begin long ago and far away. My interest in collective nouns collided with my reverence for William Archibald Spooner to coin the phrase a wunch of bankers.
Here and now in the USA and in 2009, my opinion of banks and bankers is rather lower. I’m still seething* about the incident of Citi, Citizens, and the mortgage payment. The mortgage was, and still is, with Citi. It was paid automatically from an account at Citizens.
Earlier this year, I instructed Citi to take future mortgage payments from an account at Bank of America. Citi’s website, though which I made the change, gave no indication that there would be any problem. I also closed the Citizens Bank account.
I was rather surprised, then, to find that: Citi attempted to take the next payment from Citizens; Citizens attempted to make the payment; and that Citizens then charged the account due to insufficient funds. I called Citizens about it, and was told that I was responsible for the fees incurred, since I had authorized Citi to take payments from my Citizens account. It didn’t matter that I’d closed the account, and that I’d told Citi not to take any more payments from it.
The Citizens Bank agent on the phone advised me to contact Citi and take the matter up with them. It seemed to me unlikely that Citi would agree to pay for its system’s mistake. “What do you think Citi will say?” I asked the Citizens agent. He told me that he didn’t know, and that was precisely why I should call Citi. I must admit that he sort of had a sort of point.
I recently paid off Citizens, because it has the power to hurt my credit rating if I don’t. Yes, I might well be able to get the credit rating corrected. But I probably shouldn’t spend too much more time and energy on this matter.
Instead, I will let the healing power of blogging* banish the beasts of banking from my brain, and move on. I would like banks to pay for their own mistakes, but don’t really expect them to do so. I regard my payment of $100 as being a sort of cross between protection money and a mini-bailout – one dwarfed by the trillions involved in the big bailout.
I currently use Bank of America. BoA isn’t perfect. For example, its website won’t allow a transfer from savings to checking. Right now, it won’t allow me to pay bills online (due to scheduled maintenance).
BoA also mixed up some details of my account and my downstairs neighbor’s account. I know this because they have called me at home and asked for him. I hope and think that the landline number is the only thing that’s somehow leaked between the accounts (which share the same street address, but have different appartment numbers, and certainly different account holders).
Thanks to Jason for the photo of the old bank vault (and the old banker). Thanks also to the competent and helpful bankers, who are more plentiful than the above might suggest.
* I’m serious about the healing power of blogging. After writing this, I’m not seething any more.
End of Summer
September 15, 2009
What marks the end of summer? Labor Day? That’s the day on which the US seems to switch off summer. The autumnal equinox? That has much to recommend it, including the loveliness of the term autumnal equinox.
But it seems to me that summer ended yesterday: Monday September 14, the day on which Maddie (and other Boston Public Schools kindergarten kids) started the new school year. That’s about halfway between 2009′s Labor Day and equinox.
We had a lot of fun this summer, much of it watery. Here are Maddie and Max enjoying the wet playground at the Soule Recreation Center. (The Soule is in Brookline, on Hammond Street, just south of route 9.)
And now, on with autumn, Boston’s best season. Yes, I do still call it autumn rather than fall, even after all these years in New England. Anyway, autumn 2009 will probably be our last season in Boston…
Forward Into the Future
September 14, 2009
Having a smarter phone, and hence a more mobile web, is making me rethink multiple aspects of the web and how I use it. For example, I thought of streamlining my use of email. Right now, I have three main email accounts, and am on more than a few distribution lists. I don’t know how many lists I’m on, which strongly suggests that I’m on too many.
It might make sense to choose one email, autoforward the others to that mailbox, and get off most or all of the distribution lists. That would give me manageable mobile email.
But one of the emails is andrew dot watson at yahoo.com. To autoforward from that mailbox would cost me $20 a year, every year for the forseeable future. In Yahoo’s helpful words: Yahoo! Mail allows you to forward messages that come to your Yahoo! Mail Plus account to another email address. I emphasize Plus because Plus includes forwarding and POP access, whereas basic Yahoo mail does not include these features, basic though they seem to me.
I shouldn’t be too hard on Yahoo (especially since I own some shares). It’s not the only site that charges for forwarding. The site that hosts this blog has a similar policy in place if you want to redirect yourblogname.wordpress.com (as well as all of your permalinks) to your new domain name. The WordPress policy is similar to the Yahoo policy, but it’s not identical. It costs $10, rather than $20, a year.
That leads me to the following recommendations.
- For service providers, such as Automattic (owners of WordPress.com) and Yahoo: consider offering a “forward forever” deal. I’d suggest pricing it at twice the cost of one year’s forwarding. That way, the user gets to pay and forget, rather than being reminded every year that they need to keep paying for a service they don’t really us. That would be good for reputation, goodwill, etc. – and for cash flow, in that you’d get money now, rather than in future year.
- For web service users, especially content creators, think about leaving a service before you think about using that service. This echoes the advice given to firefighters: don’t go into a building without knowing your way out.
- For web service users again: own your own domain. I’ve taken my own advice here, by owning changingway.org. On the other hand, I don’t own flickr.com, which is where I keep most of my photos (including the one used in this post).
But that brings me back to Yahoo, which owns Flickr, and forward to consideration of getting photos out of Flickr and other photo services…. which deserves a separate post.
DC Photo Safari
September 12, 2009
Washington DC was a lot of fun over the last few days. Since I expect to be spending a lot of time in and around the capital (if not the Capitol) over the years to come, it hereby joins the elite ranks of things that have their own category on this blog.
I found DC to be a very photogenic city, even though we’re at the opposite end of the year from spring, the season in which it is reputed to be at its best. I particularly loved the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. I refer to, and loved, both the building itself and the contents.
I asked very respectfully on the way in whether photography was permitted within the museum: without flash, of course. I was told that it was permitted with flash (but with some additional and, to me, reasonable restrictions). So I snapped away happily, but without flash, which I consider to be intrusive inside museums (and in many other places).
In contrast, when I tried to take a photo of the Thurgood Marshall building, I was told that it was not allowed. I may construct a grumble later, but right now it’s time to head back to Boston.
rssCloud: FTW or WTF?
September 8, 2009
rssCloud: what is it? Well, the cloud part refers to cloud computing: “a style of computing in which.. resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the ‘cloud’ that supports them.” Cloud is a good metaphor: just as we don’t need to understand how clouds work in order to use the rain for drinking, irrigation, or an excuse to stay indoors, we don’t need to understand how the internet, the web, etc. work in order to use this style of computing.
I have both good and grumpy remarks to make about rssCloud. I’ll make some of the good ones at the end of this post.
My first grumpy remarks are about the term rssCloud and, in particular, about the first three letters. Although RSS itself has been around for about as long as the current millennium, the term RSS hasn’t really caught on. To illustrate, here’s how Ben at Mashable started his post on rssCloud.
RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, helps you stream all of your news and blog sources into an easy-to-manage RSS reader such as Google Reader (Google Reader). Millions of people use RSS to keep up with Mashable (Mashable), The New York Times, and even LOLcats.
However, it does have its limitations. The big one is speed. It can take minutes to hours for a blog post to reach the reader through RSS. This has been a big reason why more and more people are turning to real-time services like Twitter (Twitter) and FriendFeed (FriendFeed) for their news. In the real-time web, delayed news and information just isn’t good enough.
Now WordPress has done something big that eliminates that RSS delay problem and brings WordPress.com’s 7.5 million blogs into real-time… It has implemented RSSCloud…
Ben took two paragraphs before he even got to RSSCloud itself, even though he writes for a pretty web-literate audience. Matt at WordPress also felt the need to start with an explanation of RSS.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s a way for people to subscribe to updates to your blog using a client like Google Reader or Bloglines. You may not know what RSS is but chances are people are using it to read your blog…. Today we turned on support for… RSS Cloud.
By the way, you might be wondering why I use rssCloud when Ben and Matt both capitalize RSS. It’s because I went to the source and found rssCloud. By the source I mean Dave Winer, and rssCloud.org, where he boasts: “Great domain name, don’t you think! (And they say all the good ones are taken.)” While I’m handing out links, I’ll add the recent posts at ReadWriteWeb and at TechCrunch.
So, given that RSS still requires explanation, rssCloud hardly seems like a very intuitive term for this fast feed technology. I’d have preferred something involving feed and fast, or feed and speed, or… OK, maybe lots of those domains are taken, or it seems best to use the buzzword du jour cloud.
I rather like LightningCloud, and indeed LightningCloud.org was available. It isn’t any more, since I grabbed it (and pointed it at a new WordPress.com blog). There is a problem: there’s a firm called LightningCloud Technologies.
There must be something better than rssCloud (the term). And with that, enough about the name and about enough with the grump.
The good news is that rssCloud (the technology) fits well with the impatient internet (which is similar to what Mashable Ben called the real-time web). It does so by allowing old school web services (similar to what we used to call Web 2.0) like WordPress to fit in to the now web. rssCloud also allows you to get a fast feed of this blog, since it’s hosted at WordPress.com.
Pixelpipe From Android to Flickr
September 7, 2009
This is the first of the photos taken with the new G1 phone to make it to my Flickr account. It’s good to be able to carry a phone and a camera (and other things) in one device, and to be able to upload directly from said device (I used Pixelpipe).
But it isn’t quite as good as it might be, for a couple of reasons. First, the screen on the G1 isn’t good enough for me to decide which photos are Flickr-worthy. It’s not a question of space on Flickr (which is unlimited with a Pro account), I just like to be somewhat selective about what’s in my photostream. Most photos I take are obviously unworthy, a few are obviously worthy, but in many cases it isn’t clear from the G1 screen.
Second, I was hoping that since the G1 has a GPS, it would automatically GPS-tag each photo. I wonder if there’s a way to make this happen?
