It’s been a while since I have done some painting, but I recently had some time off, and a real desire to paint some of my Firestorm Armada ships. I don’t really enjoy painting that much in most cases (I vastly prefer assembling models), but for some reason I enjoy painting my space ships. Part of it is that they are simple enough that I don’t have to worry about getting bogged down in the details. Also, they are not people, which, for me, is a significant bonus. While I haven’t really gotten to painting my tanks in Warhammer 40K, I do enjoy painting my warjacks in Warmachine. In any event, I have pictures.
All posts by The Plaid Mentat
Enhancing Pathfinder ACG
One of the things that I have done a lot since I got my 3D printer is make game enhancements. There are oftentimes things that I can do to make a game smoother, easier to set up/tear down, or better organized. For Pathfinder, my group struggled a bit with location deck organization. Using the recommended setup, our group found that location decks took up a bit too much room on the table, and, inevitably, someone would need access to the deck on the opposite side of the table.
To help alleviate this problem, I designed location card holders.
Pathfinder ACG
I recently started playing the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and, though I haven’t played it very long, I am intrigued by the design space it explores. In some ways it reminds me a bit of an MMO world, everything has a little bit of fluff, and they all interact to make a living world in a sort of fractally generated way (even if, at times, it’s somewhat chaotic or mixed up – but I don’t worry about that). Each card has a plot element associated with it, each location has a micro-story with mechanics to back it up, each scenario is the leg of an adventure with its own goals, and each adventure has an arc. While it certainly fits into the “role playing lite” segment of gaming, I’ve found it a nice reprieve from Descent with more of a focus on story, and less on the dungeon crawl.
Mechanically, I also find the game pretty sound. I was a bit worried going in that the combination of dice, player decks, location decks, and the blessing deck would get pretty chaotic and squash any meaning from player choice. However, after playing it, I found that they actually do a pretty good job of making choices matter (which, I believe, was one of the explicit design goals).
A Day in the Life: Part 3
This is the last entry in my series on a typical day in my life. The first two parts are here and here. This part will cover my evenings after work.
Evening Time To Get Away
Once I get home, Jessa and I usually discuss dinner – in the same way I imagine very few couples do it:
“What do you want for dinner?”
“Food. What do you want for dinner?”
“Food.”
“What kind of food?”
“Edible food”
“What kind of edible food?”
“Good edible food.”
“Oh, too bad, we don’t have any of that.”
This discussion usually doesn’t last too long before someone folds and we decide what to eat. Once dinner is ready, we settle down for our one hour of television per day – an episode of some show that we like, watched on DVD. We batch watch shows by season, then move on to something else. Our current rotating list is: Criminal Minds, Doctor Who (there’s always more Doctor Who), Leverage, Millennium, or Supernatural. We just recently finished White Collar, and our previous shows have included such things as Death Note, Stargate SG1, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Warehouse 13 among others. This is Jessa’s and my family time and shared experience together, and gives us things to talk about.
Aside: I love my job
I really enjoy my job, though precisely why I do is quite difficult for me to convey in writing – it’s tied up in what I do, who I work with, and just how much fun the daily problem solving is for me. If this sounds strange to you, this post is likely going to be difficult to grok. For everyone else, here I go…
What I do
I am the Data Operations Supervisor at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. I’ve been working for the NSIDC off and on since 2005 (I started as a student while I was working on my graduate degree), and consistently since 2010 (when I graduated and came back to work full time). My job is currently split between data operations tasks, high-level architecture/engineering, and administrative/supervisory stuff.
The data operations tasks take the bulk of my time, but because I have one foot in architecture, I help bubble up things that would make the job easier/harder, while also integrating new technologies/techniques into our operational stack. Going back and forth between detailed troubleshooting and high-level work in particular makes this very rewarding as I get to tackle problems from both ends – how to fix it now, and how to keep it from breaking tomorrow.
A Day in the Life: Part 2
This is a continuation of my series on a typical day in my life. The first part is here. This part sets up what my day job is like in probably more detail than anyone wants to know. I’ll talk about why I love my job in another aside.
Another Morning
Once I get to work, my day isn’t quite as time stamped and regular as the rest of the morning, but there are some key things that I’ve come to count on. I make breakfast in the work kitchen, and start getting caught up on my morning e-mail. Ops gets a lot of automated e-mail (including normal e-mail, it’s not uncommon for us to get 200-400 e-mails/day), however, a lot of these convey valuable status on the state of the system, so it’s useful to know first thing in the morning. Additionally, we have some daily processing that gets kicked off at ~6:00am, since this is in the critical path for a lot of our near-real-time products, it’s good to have a pulse on that processing earlier rather than later. Typically, gathering an understanding of the state of the system can take until 9:00 or longer depending on what’s going on.
The Operations stand-up is at 9:00am every morning. This is (in theory) a quick, 15 minute, standing meeting with my team to organize the morning and keep everyone on the team apprised of the goings-on of the system. Each day, someone is scheduled to be the ECS lead (responsible for the care and feeding of the EOSDIS Core System – our primary data management system for NASA data), while a second person is scheduled as the V0 lead, which (for historical reasons) is the backup (responsible for our non-ECS operations). During the stand-up, the prior lead and backup provide anything notable from the previous day, as well as any outstanding items. Then, everyone else statuses on their tasks, and any impacts from their work the rest of the team needs to know about.
Aside: Sometimes I Wake Up at 4:00am
As many of my friends and family know, I’m a morning person. When I wake up in the morning, I’m awake and ready to tackle my day. Not only that, I’m at my most productive in the morning, especially early in the morning. One way this manifests is that occasionally I wake up between 4:00 and 4:30am. Oddly, this is something that has happened to me for a fair amount of my adult life, but I’ve never really understood why – it’s simply that, some mornings, I wake up, completely ready to face my day much earlier.
Even though I typically end up with less sleep from the night prior, I actually look forward to these mornings. As you might imagine, there is almost no one else awake at that hour. In particular, anyone in my circle of friends is either at work still or just crawling off to bed (most people I know fit in the “night owl” category). So, with no distractions and my mind at its peak, I find that I’m able to get a lot more done, and be a lot more creative. It’s also early enough, that I’m not typically distracted by my imminent departure for work. As such, this is a windfall of free time that I can use to tinker with something, try something new, or even get some writing in.
I’ve occasionally thought about planning my day so that I could consistently get up this early by going to bed earlier. Since I’m more energized in the morning than I am in the evening, I’ve often thought that if I could skew my schedule so that I went to sleep at 8:00 and woke up at 4:00, I could get the best of both worlds – enough sleep to make it through the day, and wake up at 4:00am. The more pragmatic part of me knows that this wouldn’t work though – between my job and family time, it’s not really feasible to get to bed that early. Instead, I just roll with it, and when my mind and body say that I need to wake up early one morning, I do.
J. R. R. Tolkien on War
The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done.
–J. R. R. Tolkien (in a letter to his son Christopher, 1944)
A Day in the Life: Part 1
There are no typical days, but my days have a pattern to them that make it so that I can expect what’s coming. As part of getting back into blogging, I wanted to write a bit about what that looks like. The next few posts might be incredibly boring to some, but maybe a few people will enjoy.
Morning Glory
For me, a typical day starts at 6:00am… …Sortof. One particularly bad habit I have been trying to kick is my morning battle with the alarm clock. It starts sounding at 6:00am, but I get a lot of use out of the nine minute snooze button, and I don’t actually fully wake up and get out of bed until around 6:45. Once I’m actually out of bed, the rest of my morning ritual is pretty pedestrian – get dressed, brush my hair and put it in a ponytail, and grab my cell phone off the charger. With the exception of grabbing my flannel and work bag, I’m essentially ready to go at this point, and it really takes me no more than about six minutes (which is why I have a tendency to sleep past my first alarm).
What Am I Doing Besides Blogging?
It turns out I have a bit of project mania. I’ve got a lot of ideas for projects, some of which I start, and a number of small ones I have finished. But, it turns out, the last thing I typically think to do is to write about those projects. The struggle here is simple – why write about a project when I could be working on it (or the next one)?
The difficulty is simply that my writing and my project time have typically been the same. As a result, I was forced to make that choice every time I sat down to work on my projects. My hope is that this may be mitigated by writing on the bus. Now, these two are not coupled, when I’m on the bus, I can’t really work on my other projects! So, here is a brief outline of some things that I’ve been working on: