Life, the final frontier

Computer kablooey, flee to Prague!

Fortunately I’ve done PC upgrades often enough to expect trouble automatically, so when I upgraded my home computer with a new motherboard, new memory and a new graphics card I wasn’t expecting a smooth ride. The cause for the upgrade was my desire for more gaming graphics power, and since my old mobo had AGP/DDR connections this seemed like a good time to also upgrade to a modern PCIe/DDR2 motherboard. So I did.

Installation went fine mechanically, though my microATX case is a bit cramped. Still, everything fit after some tweaking. When I booted up to Win XP I got what I was halfway expecting: a boot failure, due to the changed chipset etc (boot gets going, then stops and the thing reboots). So I’ll need to try and repair the rig with a Windows XP install disk in repair mode, fair enough – and if all else fails I have backups of the important stuff and can always do a clean reinstall.

Next up, boot to Linux. That failed too, complaining about failure to detect (SATA) disk. After some cursing (I was sure I had remembered to compile in the needed drivers), I discovered that the BIOS defaults to non-native SATA mode for backwards compatibility reasons. Duh. After fixing that, Linux booted fine to text mode. Hooray! X11 didn’t start up, but that was to be expected.

The next day I tried to get X to work, and finally had to revert to the base “vesa” driver – the current incarnation of the Gentoo “ati” and/or “radeonhd” drivers don’t support the 4850HD yet, and the ATI binary drivers aren’t compatible with the recently-released xorg 1.5.0 I’m running. Oh well, at least I get X/KDE via the vesa driver, it’s not like I need accelerated graphics in Linux much anyway right now.

Whle I was doing this the machine froze up a few times, which started to worry me. So I did the first thing I always do when random freezes happen: I fired up memtest86+. Lo and behold, it started showing red “memory fail” results almost at once. I tried with the memory in different slots, and with different memory timings. No go. In the end I had to concude that the memory was just plain bad. That, or there’s some wierd incompatibility with my new motherboard which should support DDR2 800 dual channel according to specs.

…so today it was back to Verkkokauppa. After explaining the situation I got a refund on the memory and grabbed a replacement 2GB from the store – this time “plain basic” DD2 667, in case it’s some motherboard bug with the 800’s or something. Tonight, if I have time, I’ll try things out again.

“If I have time” because my flight to Prague for the VTES EC tournament leaves pretty early tomorrow morning and I still have a ton of prep plus packing to do for that. Looking forward to the trip; I have three more or less tournament-ready decks with me and intend to quickly put together a few more decks for casual play. Never been to Prague before, I’m told it’s a great city though I hear varying opinions about how expensive it is nowadays. I guess it can’t be too bad since I’m coming from Helsinki, one of the most expensive cities in the world at the moment. Hell, even Paris didn’t seem bad in comparison. […]

Escape from Innopoli

Our company moved from Innopoli 2 to Spektri last Friday (across the Ring I road, maybe half a kilometer). It was supposed to be a fast and easy move, but thanks to an understaffed moving company staffed with people from the very shallow end of the gene pool, it actually took well into the evening before we have all the stuff moved over.

Ignoring the moving hassle it’s all good. The new office is 2-3x bigger than the old one and so much nicer. It’s quiet and we have the place to ourselves instead of being situated along a communal corridor like in Innopoli. Spektri has a very nice gym available (with sauna), and the whole place feels like an actual office instead of the cubicle barracks that Innopoli feels like. In addition, there’s both parking space available and a bus stop right outside. Oh, and we’re no longer limited to two caffeterias with crap quality-vs-price ratios. No complaints here. […]

Flee to France!

A quick “what’s up” note, this. Ropecon 2008 came and went, I had a lot of fun despite getting very little sleep. The traditional big VTES tournament was a success once again, I now have a tournament report available for that. The other highlight of the con, for me, was managing to attend Greg Stolze’s demo of his new game, A Dirty World. It was actually the first convention rpg game that I have ever attended, and boy was it worth it. Besides being a kick-ass game designer, Greg proved to be a very cool guy and extremely competent GM. I had a ton of fun playing a heroin-addicted femme fatale…

The rest of the week has been spent in recovery, of sorts. Janka and I are both on vacation now, so we’ve just taken it easy for a while. That said, it feels like it’s been an extremely busy week, I’ve continually been doing something and feel that I managed to only do a small portion of the stuff I had intended. So it goes.

We decided that we needed a short break from all this, so we booked a flight to Paris – leaves tomorrow morning, back on Saturday. It’s been… what, 30 years since I was last there, so I don’t remember much anything, and Janka’s never been there at all. So we’ll spend three days doing the tourist things (Louvre, Notre Dame, the Catacombs, etc) while trying to get by on our extremely limited French vocabulary. Should be fun. I’m trying (in vain) to remember the basic rudiments of French verbs…. and since I know that’s doomed to failure, I’m taking along a phrase book and trying to resist the urge to go for a Monty Python French accent.

Back by the weekend. […]

Finncon weekend

Rounding up a week of vacation for me was Finncon (the annual Finnish science fiction convention) at Tampere. No “must meet” authors there this time around, but since our summer place is near Tampere anyway we decided to go, spending the nights at out place. Glad we did, Finncon was ok but nothing special and the merged Animecon meant that the place was crawling with (mostly very young) anime/mange fans. I joked that my “Finncon ‘91” t-shirt was older than the median age there…

…but that didn’t really stop me enjoying the con, mostly as a “relaxing weekend away from home”. Attended some entertaining talks and panels, saw a few nice short films and met some people I don’t otherwise see all that often – and we must not forget the artistic highlight of the con, the no-budget short film “Atlantiksen Jumala” from Petri Hiltunen and the gang. Horribly and intentionally bad as always, but also entertaining because of that.

Nice vacation week otherwise, too. Time sped by fast, I managed to do a very small fragment of the things I had intended to do but that’s normal. Now it’s back to work for a couple of busy weeks, then two more weeks of vacation right after Ropecon. […]

Sailing, ho!

We spent the weekend sailing, out by Nauvo. A friend offered us a weekend trip on their family’s 30ft sailboat and we jumped at the chance. It’s been a while since I’ve done any sailing, so it also took a while to remember which rope did what… In any case, lots of fun and I managed to totally scorch myself. The weather forecast had been a bit on the gloomy side, but fortunately the actual weather was great; it rained a tiny bit Friday evening but Saturday and Sunday were in full “scorchio!” mode.

Now feeling a bit tired after the long weekend, good thing we have these “weekday” things during which we can relax… […]

VTES weekend, with sauna

Very nice weekend, Teemu & Tuukka organized a repetition of last year’s VTES miniqualifier tournament weekend – in other words, 2 days of VTES tournament and casual play, with beer, sauna and the option to swim in the sea. Huge amount of fun, and the sea wasn’t that cold anymore… at least not after enough alcohol in the bloodstream, to keep things lubricated.

Did poorly in the first day’s tournament, but that was no big surprise; I was playing my Daughters anarch voter, which isn’t really a tournament deck (I’ve been forced to conclude). When it works it works great, but it can and will fail in so many ways. In other words, it’s much too fragile. Had fun playing, though, and the casual games in the evening were entertaining also. Tuomas went on to win the first day tournament with his Mind Rape + Tupdog deck (which he in vain tried to claim wasn’t actually a Mind Rape + Tupdog deck).

Second day went much better, I tried out my newish Osebo combat toolbox and it did surprisingly well. After a table sweep and some extra VPs, I make it to the finals. Things actually looked pretty good there for a while, but then I ran out of intercept and Tuukka’s Malks swept over me. Was largely my own fault, I fouled up by transferring out the wrong vampire by mistake; if I had gotten the rush-capable Massassi out (as intended), things might have gone differently. Oh well. In any case, I was pleasantly suprised by the performance of that deck, even though it has lots of weak points. Need more Preternatural Strength (doesn’t everyone?)…

The last tournament round ended in a draw, with Tuomas and Tuukka both betting 2 VPs and Jukka getting one – but Tuukka got tournament win due to higher preliminary round totals. Score one more for the old-school Malks (though Tuukka’s deck didn’t use Dominate and was a pretty interesting take on the Malk S+B concept).

I think I’ll dismantle most of my current decks (barring the Osebo one and a Toreador one I’m working on) and build up some new ones with ideas I’ve been gathering. […]

Incoming fire has right of way

Giving rest and relaxation a wide pass, we spent last weekend at a paintball wargame weekend, organized by a friend. Around 25 people, most pretty experienced… and then us and a couple of other semi-newbies as designated cannonfodder. I’ve tried paintball before now and then, but only with shortish sessions at rental game fields. This was a bit more intense, we spent about 8 hours crawling around the forest on Saturday and a few more on Sunday. Hot, sweaty, exhausting and quite fun. I died a lot (no surprise), but did manage to get some kills in. I think Janka did a bit better, but who knows – this was an informal “for fun” event, with no scorekeeping or anything like that. Just normal capture-the-flag and some extra scenarios thrown in for spice.

Since this was the anniversary of the Normandy D-Day invasion, we ended off Sunday with a simulated invasion scenario: six people with either full-auto markers or good semi-autos defending a small bridge, and everyone else trying to storm over it to capture the flag. Fun, even though I managed to run out of ammo in the end and only noticed this while hunkering down in a bed of nettles with paint whizzing over my head.

Good exercise in any case, I can still feel some complaints from my leg muscles… and it was nice to spend a few nights sleeping in a tent, the last time we used our tent was at Burning Man (and it showed, the amount of playa dust in the tent bag was ridiculous).

Anyway, it was good fun, good food and good weather. No complaints. […]

Twilight Revolted

We had the “postrelease” tournament for the new Twilight Rebellion VTES set on Saturday. I’ve always found pre/postrelease tournaments a lot of fun, and this was no exception – about 20 players, and lots of new cards to try to figure out. We made decks from 5 drafted Anarchs boosters plus 5 drafted Twilight Rebellion boosters, so it was a low-resource game for everyone. No pool gain, very limited intercept, etc. Tuomas took the tournament win once again, with Tuukka coming in second place, proving that some people are just better players than others. No surprise there.

The set looks solid. Lots of powerful cards for the Anarchs, just what they’ve needed in order to be tournament-level viable. The balance looks good; while there are some very powerful cards in there, they also have suitable restrictions; I didn’t spot any immediate this-will-become-a-problem cases yet. We’ll see, once people start building decks from these. It becomes legal for tournament play on June 27th.

Sunday was a lazy day, which was nice and much-needed. We had one of our semi-regular movie weekends, with some people coming over to watch stuff with the theme “virtual realities” – which meant Matrix, The 13th Floor and ExistenZ. I’d seen all three before, but they stood up well to second (or third) viewings. Read a bit, ate lots of good cabbage soup, did some more Rails coding… nice and relaxing. […]

And this is how I feel

People say that your dreams
are the only things that save ya.
Come on baby in our dreams,
we can live on misbehavior.

The weekend is starting up, the sun is shining, and this song – from what’s is still one of the best albums I’ve heard during the last 5 or so years – manages to reflect my mental state perfectly. It’s a very good state, in case you’re wondering. The song itself is open to interpretation, like so many great songs are.

It’s “Rebellion (Lies)” from Arcade Fire’s “Funeral” album, in case you don’t know.

Also worth checking out are these fantastic live performances of Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels), Neighborhood #3 (Power Out), No Cars Go and Wake Up.

God, I want to see these guys live, someday.

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