I took a look at this one today: 1985 Endeavour 33

My "too good to be true" alarm is going off, but I can't find a real reason. The owner said he would take $5000.00 for it!

The problems I saw were:
rot around the chainplate, not good, but can be fixed
a soft spot on the cabin roof near the mast
some leaky ports
lots of barnacles on the bottom
general neglect

The owner said he "guaranteed" that the engine would start and the sale would be contingent on that, but right now the battery is dead and the fuel is old.

He demonstrated the electronics, the refrigerator, the lights. It has a mainsail in a bag and a headsail on the furler. I don't know how good they are, but my goal is to have something to get started with and learn on. I don't mind some projects, I just want to be reasonably sure that it's safe.

Anybody with boating experience have any thoughts?

So I went and looked at a sailboat to buy on Saturday.

Click on the photo for more pictures.

Now I'm really conflicted, part of me thinks a boat would be a way to learn something and get more out of life. The other part says it would be a stupid waste of money. Around and around go those thoughts along with other thoughts questioning my ability to deal with a boat and my general sanity.

( more rambling below )

The list of TV shows that I bother to watch is rapidly dwindling. Some are getting canceled, others I've just lost interest in. Stargate Atlantis was the last of the real "starships and aliens" type of scifi show which I really favor. Lately I've been downloading all the old 60's/70's shows that I've missed, but there aren't too many of those left.

So I'm just wondering if anyone knows of anything I'm missing right now. Here's my "worth watching" list:

The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Pushing Daisies (canceled)
Sanctuary (mostly because I really like Amanda Tapping, and it's cool that it went from a web series to a real series)
Smallville
Reaper (canceled?)
Burn Notice (not scifi, but shot in FL, costarring Bruce Campbell)
Lost (I can take or leave)
Eureka (canceled? Silly, but fun)
Doctor Who

Others that I know of but don't watch:
Heroes (just couldn't get into this season)
Battlestar Galactic (could never get past the stupid premise of undetectable cylon clones, bad direction and no characters to like)
Knight Rider (canceled. shocking!)
True Blood
Fringe

I'll probably give Dollhouse a chance, but it looks more like a spy show from what I've seen.

Till then, I'll keep watching "Star Maidens" from from the mid-70's when the future was made of lucite :-)

I no longer feel embarrassed by the President of the United States. What an odd feeling after 8 years.

My friends and family got together and got me the best birthday surprise I can remember. It is a Neo Freerunner cell phone.
Freerunner specs

It runs linux and is completely hackable. I've loaded 3 different software distributions on it so far. It has most of the capabilities of the iPhone, with twice the screen resolution and none of the vendor lock-in. It worked without a hitch with my T-Mobile GSM Sim card.
It looks better in person than in the pics. Kind-of like Darth Vader's cell phone, so I'm happy with that. Some of the software has a long way to go, but that's part of the fun.

Thank you to everyone who chipped in and/or came to the party.

We got home around 2pm today and are exhausted and possibly infected with the dreaded con crud.

High point was roaming the Hyatt and Mariott with our largest Stonecutter group yet (14). People were amused by our loud, off-key singing. Eventually we even remembered all the words. One of the people who saw us and appreciated our costumes was Don Payne, a Writer and Co-Executive producer for the Simpsons. I begged him for a job, but he said kissing Matt Groening feet was already his job. I've found one youtube video of us so far, but not of us singing.

Second cool thing was that Rainbow Sun Franks took a picture of me in my mad scientist costume.

Third really cool thing was that Jewel Staite stopped to have *her* picture taken with Dre in his Hurley costume.

I'm so Jealous, this guy has not one, but 2 Deloreans, and he has converted one to electric power. That's my ideal car! I've always wanted a Delorean since I first read about it in Popular Science in 1980. Lately I've been reading a lot about electric car conversions, because it sounds like a crazy-fun challenge that I could actually use if I succeeded. Now all I need is for someone to donate all the parts!

http://www.electricdelorean.com

And the oscar for best soporific goes to...

WTF, seriously? Some beautiful shots of landscapes, no music. Tommy Lee, could you act old and crusty? Yeah that's great, such a stretch for you. And Javier Bardem just bring any acting you're trying to do down so far that we can't tell you from the pointless string of corpses you're creating. I think the Cohens have been taking directing lessons from Lucas!

What happened to the crazy idea of a story where you cared about the characters? or even hate the bad guy? I just didn't care about anyone in this. Ok, maybe a touch of sympathy for the sheriff, but that was it.

I seem to have a knack for doing the "right" thing and having it go badly wrong. The company I've been working for for over 3 years has never been successful. They've limped along with 3-4 employees, surviving thanks to a series of misguided investors. I've been expecting them to fold for the past 2 years. So in January, when a friend had an offer for part time work at a different company, it seemed like a good opportunity to diversify my income. I made arrangements to work half time for the new and old place, and the old place hired a new programmer to basically be my replacement. The goal was to transition to full time at the new place after 3-6 months.

Well, last week, I found out that the new company was broke, due to some embezzlement/internal melt down. As a result, the project both my friend and I were working on got cancelled, and I may never get the money I've already billed them for. On top of that, my boss at the old company is so incompetent that he didn't budget correctly to pay for me and my replacement during the overlap time, so I can't even work half-time for him right now.

So, I'm looking for a job. Linux/C programming preferably. Something with Robotics would be a dream job. User interface stuff could be cool. I can do web/database stuff, but am really sick of that. I'd love to work on a product that actually got used, or at company that was successful. The last company I worked for went bankrupt. I'm amused that the company that bought their assets and hired several of their employees *also* went bankrupt, and *that* company's assets got bought by someone else who appears to be trying the same failed product.

Anyway, I signed up for linkedin.com since it was recommended in the Sunday paper, anyone find it useful?

If you have any suggestions on where to look for programming jobs, let me know. I'm looking at monster, dice and careerguide, but most positions seem to be head hunters and I can't even tell what the hell the job might be or if I'm qualified.

"After 280 millions tubes sold, Trinitron will be officially dead this month. Few Sony inventions have had the same gravitational pull as their Trinitron display technology... Trinitron became synonym of the best quality TV sets and computer monitors in the planet... Sony became the king of TV, with more than 100 million sets sold by 1994, to later fall under the weight of plasma and LCD technologies."

http://gizmodo.com/363191/sony-trinitron-timeline-shows-why-it-will-live-forever-in-our-hearts/

I still miss my big, heavy 20" Trinitron monitors. I finally found some LCD's that don't give me a headache, but they just don't have the color and subtlety the tubes had when they were new.

As a youth, I whiled away many a happy hour playing rpgs. D&D, Gamma World, Runequest, Traveller. Eventually I got tired of the pointless constraints of the D&D system and started thinking of creating my own set of rules. In college a friend and I made a first pass, even getting to the play-testing phase. Then we discovered GURPS (and women) and our project was never completed.
Since then I've played several other systems and read the rules for tons more. I always liked the open ended concept of GURPS, but was bothered by all the special-case rules and even simple things like "rolling low is good". So, as an attempt at a sanity-preserving creative project, I have revived my attempt to create the game that *I* want to play.
When I get further along, I'll make it available for feedback, but right now I am mostly at the thought experiment stage. And that is where I need some input. I'd like to collect a bunch of scenarios that other game systems don't handle well. A couple of examples:

overwhelmed by gremlins. I think most games fail to correctly capture the fact that even the best fighter will be overwhelmed by a large number of pathetic enemies. In many games it's like our hero can just stand there with a big smile on his face as his foes dangle ineffectually from his bulging biceps. I maintain that at some point, with sufficient enemies no matter how pathetic, our hero should go down.

weapon/player differences. I also think that most games don't capture much nuance in the difference between various weapons and players. Often a fight devolves to "I hit you/you hit me" until someone goes down. The fast player with a rapier doesn't "work" any differently than the slower player with the bastard sword. So in the end it is a race to see who can get the weapon that does the most damage, and that's all that matters.

If you can think of any scenarios that bug you that you'd like to see handled better in a game system, post them as comments and I'll use them in testing out my rules.

I slept great last night in spite of raging thunderstorms. Even got up early (for me) today. Tonight it's totally quiet out and sleep is being elusive. Grrrrr. If there's a pattern I just can't figure it out.

Finally watched Danny Boyle's Sunshine last night.
( spoiler cut )

I was pleasantly surprised by the premiere of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles". Sure it was mostly a rehash/reintroduction of stuff we already knew, but it was entertaining. I actually expected this to be worse than the new Bionic Woman, but I liked Terminator more. I tried to get into the Bionic Woman, but it just didn't work for me.
The SPFX were good, but understated in TSCC, just like in the original terminator movie. They also managed to skirt around the issues raised by the 3rd movie in a reasonable way, given the terminator Milieu (hint: it involved time travel)
Summer Glau once again manages to be a tiny, cute, ass-kicking machine. Some characters reminded me of the SM Sterling Terminator novels, but maybe that's just because they share Terminator canon.
Anyway, it may turn into the T800 of the week, but here's hoping they can do something more clever with it.

Under the cut is a picture of Janene and I in our aliens costumes at the Atomic Lounge New Years Eve party. (aka kungfugimp and razerwolfe's house).
We made a video to show at the party, and I've now edited it to include live footage from the party. View it in all it's glory here.
( photo evidence )

I have recently become more aware of the worst case scenario module I carry around inside my head. Perhaps there is a support group for those of us with this feature, as I know I am not the only one. If you don't have it, allow me to describe it's operation.
Whenever someone says something to you or something happens within the zone of your senses, the worst case scenario module goes to work. In other words, it's always on. And it's damned fast. Before you are even done processing what you've seen or heard, it has performed a complex analysis and dumps it into your consciousness.

example:
Your girlfriend says: "You know, I don't like peas."
Your worst case scenario module (wcsm) says: "You put peas in a salad you made 2 years ago, ever since then she's been plotting how to dump your sorry ass."

Many people mistake the wcsm for pessimism. They think those of use with a wcsm sit around a *try* to think of how things could go badly wrong. That's not the case at all, the wcsm is far more efficient than normal thought processes, and just gives you these great ideas, fully formed, in the blink of an eye. It's amazing efficiency is it's most insidious feature. Since it give you information before the rest of your feeble brain even cranks over, it sounds quite authoritative. Unfortunately, it's usually wrong. The probability of a worst case actually happening is fleetingly small.

I have no idea how to unplug this module of my brain, or how to subvert it to my will, but hopefully I'm growing more able to detect it's work before it gets incorporated into the rest of my thoughts.

I've been a role playing fan since I got the basic D&D boxed set back in the dark ages. I still remember crayoning in the number on all those weirdly shaped dice. Pretty much all of my happy memories from high school center around gaming. Our core group was 3-4 guys and we all took turns GMing and playing. D&D, Gamma World, Runequest, and traveller are the systems we used. They were all great fun, but as I got older I decided I didn't like the rules of each for one reason or another.

In college charles_midair and I made a brief attempt to write our own rules. Looking back, we were on our way to creating the most complicated system ever! Fortunately we found GURPS shortly after that and abandoned our project. Not that we ever really had time to play GURPS for some reason.

Anyway, my search continues and I've found a lot of goodies on the internet. Over the past few days I've been reading tons of stuff at The Forge. It's a site where game designer discuss the theory/philosophy of different rule systems, what works and what doesn't etc.

It turns out that I tend to like the more simulation-oriented games, like GURPS, Action! system, Fuzion etc. though there is still something that bugs me about all of them. Usually inconsistencies, exceptions or things that are too complicated to be practical. (The complicated bit is weird, if a game is too simple it bores me to death, but there is a limit in the other direction too)

Anyway, in my reading I came across some really different game systems. They let the players have a much greater role in defining what happens. For instance, in this type of game, if you search for a secret door and succeed, then there *is* a secret door, and you get to describe it. The rules in some of these games are vastly simplified and really rely on everyone in the group working together to tell a story. I'm not sure how this would work in practice as it seems like you could say "I search for the magical sword that wins the game" and if you make the rolls, you're done.

Here are the games I've found in this vein, in order of increasing complexity:
The Pool
The Window
Donjon

The pool is so simple that I am really tempted to try it, though it's very hard to figure out what you need to prepare.

If you haven't heard of channel102, check it out. They run a monthly contest in a real theater before a live audience to select 5 "prime time" shows for the month. Each episode is about 5 minutes long. If you win a slot in the prime time, you are invited to submit an episode for the next month to see how long you can keep it going.

The current winner at 11 episodes is The Defenders Of Stan, which I highly recommend. It's a simple, clever premise for a low budget production and it is very funny and well done.

I really want to produce something to submit, but so far I don't have a good idea (or better yet a writer with a good idea).

After a night of drinking and watching a Bollywood scifi movie, we thought a Bollywood-style Frankenstein would be cool. (Because a friend did a great Frankenstein's monster for Halloween) But in the cold light of morn, I realize that the singing and dancing are what makes the Bollywood style, and that probably can't be done well in a short time/low budget way.

If any aspiring writers have any ideas, send them my way.

In case you haven't heard, the re-mastered, high-def version of The Menagerie is being shown in theaters next week. Check here for details and a theatre near you.