Taking the Plunge

Now I know how Dirk the Daring felt. Last night I was playing Baldur's Gate when I reached the Thieves' Guild level. There I was confronted with a chasm, and the only way to cross was to leap across a series of floating stones. Only the stones had the disturbing tendency to drop (like a rock!) into the chasm, taking me with them. It was already too late, so while I was analyzing the stones for patterns of collapse, and trying to move faster, slower, and what not, I overlooked the obvious, that the stones would flicker before they began to fall.

Today after lunch I took another stab, after reading the above clue on GameFAQs, and made it across in only a few tries. Then the suckers confront me with another chasm, more than twice as wide. That one took longer, but not as long as the previous night. Now I'm merrily trolling along whacking thieves and spiders (and bugbears, oh my!) while trying to preserve my strength for the boss 'monster' of this level, the Thieves' Guild leader.

Oliver Sacks

Another link for someone else, this time my wife:

Oliver Sacks has a web site. Too bad it has the annoying trait of resizing your web browser...

Transformer Instruction Archive

Because I know James would dig this site, here it is. Tom, please forward?

Checkmate

As if playing dungeon crawls until bedtime wasn't enough, I had to get up early this morning to take Kelly to her first of five once-a-week sessions of the Chess Club. Reports are that she enjoyed it, and when I suggested we play chess using the chess program on Mac OS X, she was pretty enthusiastic.

Now I play a rather weak game of chess, it's been maybe thirty years since I played with any seriousness, after all. My main strategy is to capture as many pieces as I can. Well, against Kelly, a rank beginner, this works fine. I beat her in the first game, then relented against her in the second, after her repeated playful pleas of "please don't kill me!"

I actually had a hard time not checkmating her, and had to take back several moves before I managed to give her my final bishop, leading to a draw. I told her that I didn't want to let her win deliberately, because I felt that soon enough she'd learn how to beat me on her own, and then it would feel that much sweeter. I sure hope I'm right.

Tar Pit

Now this is why I generally don't play dungeon crawls after 9pm. I put the family to bed, watched Enterprise, and decided to see if I could get past the particular part of the sewers where I was killed last time I played Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. After a short while, I looked up and realized I'd been playing for ninety minutes! I swear I was only going to spend a half hour doing this then go upstairs and do some reading. Now it's pretty much bedtime.

BG:DA is as much fun as Diablo II. Maybe even as much as Dungeon Siege, I haven't made up my mind yet. Damn. Now I want to play Diablo II for awhile!

Innate Geek

This morning I noted that the MyDoom.A virus is scheduled to go active today. I started to explain to Kelly how the virus would take over people's computers and send requests to SCO, flooding their website and preventing genuine requests. Kelly jumped in before I finished and gave a pretty damn good definition of a DDOS. As far as I know, no one had taught her this, unless grade school is a lot different than I remember!

Excuse me a minute, I think I'm gonna tear up here.

New Banner

The banner is a scan (from the photo, not the negative, I'm too lazy today) from our trip last summer to Florence, Oregon-not-Italy. Click on the image to see another pose. I edited both to remove some generous ice cream smears on Kelly's face, but it's otherwise genuine.