California’s Proposition 8, which limits California to recognizing only marriages between a man and a woman, appears to have passed due to overwhelming African-American and mild Latino support:
According to exit polls, whites opposed the amendment 53-47. But blacks supported it 70-30, and Latinos supported it 51-49. The polls have blacks at 10 percent of the electorate for this issue, with Latinos at 19 percent and whites at 63 percent. (Asians, at six percent, opposed the proposition 53-47.)
it wasn’t too long ago that the courts had to intervene to allow interracial marriages. Kinda sad that just as we elect our first Black President, the African-Americans of California reject recognition of the relationships of another minority.
Although, in some tepid statements, Obama publicly stated that he was opposed to Prop 8, he also said that he opposes gay marriage. By straddling the fence and never investing any capital on the issue within the African-American community, it seems he doomed it to failure. I wonder if Ellen will be so friendly with him if he visits her show again…
Somehow I don’t think she appreciates the headline.
Charles Barkley plans to run for Governor of Alabama:
Brown: So are you going to run for governor?
Barkley: I plan on it in 2014.
Brown: You are serious.
Barkley: I am, I can’t screw up Alabama.
Brown: There is no place to go but up in your view?
Barkley: We are number 48 in everything and Arkansas and Mississippi aren’t going anywhere.
HEH.
The review is quite out of date, but it is one of the funniest Top X Lists ever created: The 20 Worst Video Games of All Time.
#14: Rapjam Volume One
Oh Jesus, this one hurts. It’s a game starring real-life rap stars, but not doing the things you might be interested in seeing. There’s no rapping, no dancing, no booty… it’s not even set in the exciting and murderous world of rap music. It’s a game about basketball. That’s right, in some sort of video game-making joke that went too far, you get to fantasize about being a rapper fantasizing about being a basketball player. To put it in terms you might be able to better understand, but probably pretend not to, it’s like when I’m pretending to be TV’s hunky Matt LeBlanc having sex with a cantaloupe which we both pretend is Lynda Carter while she’s pretending to be SCUBA Wonder Woman.
Read the whole thing..
I’ve been very curious about the power cards that the D&DI Character Builder can generate. Yesterday, Wizards released some sample paragon characters, which seem to have been generated by the Character Builder — including power cards. I think they’ve done some things right, but the cards have some flaws — both serious and minor.
Here is an example, the Dwarf Fighter’s Reaping Strike:
My first issue with the cards is that they are too static in design. The generic card designs look to have been designed by people familiar with card design (of which there are many at Wizards), but that may be the problem. In card games you play with cards that are all nearly identical, but the abilities and objects for which players want cards are numerous and have large variances in the type and quantity of data that needs to be represented.
In Wizard’s gives us four major types of cards:
* Purple: the player, action point, and second wind cards
* Utility: blue cards for class utility powers
* Item: yellow cards for magic (or non-magic really) items
* Attack: the green (at-will), red (encounter), and gray (daily) cards for the remaining powers/abilities from races and classes.
In defining types of cards, they then try to create standard areas for the data normally present in powers of that type — but in many cases this just results unneeded verbiage and wasted space. For example the Divine Challenge Card:
In the body, of the card the text is squeezed down to a nearly unreadable font because of wasted space (and some unnecessary info):
* Why is there a “Used” check box on an at-will power? And in general the point of a power card is to be able discard it when used then recollect at the end of the encounter or after resting so you don’t have to check of used powers and make sure you erase your “used” marks.
* There are far too much space is used to convey the range of the power — twice.
* The power is not an attack so the “ATTACK vs. DEFENSE” area is wasted
* The “additional effects” section is empty but still exists, thus taking up empty space.
* the bottom line is entirely wasteful — we don’t need a logo on every card, nor should we need the “AT-WILL POWER” text — the card is green…
Using the card template I created in Excel, here is my Warlock’s Curse card:
While not as pretty as the card from Wizards it is very readable because the font is much larger which I could do because I did not waste space on unused boxes and irrelevant definition. There are only 7 sections:
* Name box: colorized by the refresh period of the power (green for at-will in this case)
* Keywords box: no label is present which saves space
* Action box: again no label since it is very obvious what the meaning is
* Type/Range box: one clear way description of the type and range
* Body box: in Wizard’s card the body is less than half of the size of the card, in mine it is over 3/4 of the card
* Origin and level box: similar to Wizard’s card, but no label and combined to save space
* Reference box: as small as possible with no label.
In my card not only is the text presented in a font that is readable there are three blank lines and has indentation to aide readability.
What should guide the “sections” of a card is not what may be needed for the majority of powers, but what is needed for the specific power in question. If for a specific power the character has a feet or other ability that requires additional text be placed in the card add the “additional effects” section into the card. Or if a power isn’t an attack and doesn’t have a target (such as the Halfling Racial Power Second Chance), don’t include the attack and target sections of the card. A large section of white space is better than bits of white space in unused categories.
So today became the day, I had to “migrate” to Exchange. I used scare quotes largely because I didn’t migrate, I mitigated. Until today I used:
Email:
- GMail is my primary email tool, because of: remote accessibility, no fat client, tags, easy filtering, UI, and much more.
- Google Notifier: a Mac tool that lets me know the number of unread messages in my inbox and give me a message (similar to growl) when I have a new message, this means that I don’t have to check my email and can instantly determine if a new message needs to be addressed immediately or ignored.
- EDM (the UW Email Delivery Manager) for vacation messages (best vacation tool there is) and directing mail to deskmail and GMail
- Deskmail (UW Unix/IMAP for staff) & Webpine (horrible webUI) backup location for my email if I can’t access GMail.
- Imperium IMAP & SquirrelMail — tertiary backup, useful reference when at home and no internet connectivity.
Calendar:
- OracleCalendar: The calendaring server we have been using for years.
- Google Calendar: My personal calendars and subscribed to the OracleCalendar ICS feed of my work calendar. This has worked reasonably well (though Google fails to incorporate some events from my calendar).
- Google Notifier: Tells me when calendar items come up.
- iCal: subscribed to all my (and one of Alyssa’s) calendars, partially for sync to my iPhone and also for additional notification.
Largely because of the biases of the Exchange support team, I had feared that I would have to use one of the ugly, fat Exchange clients (Outlook, Entourage) at least some of the time. But fortunately because of the ingenuity of others that are trying to work around Exchange, I will be able to leave my interactions largely unaffected — and be able to add some functionality. Changes:
Email:
- Exchange: I created a rule to redirect mail to GMail (except invites/updates because that would cause an issue). Additionally, I have another rule to move the mail out of my inbox to my “realbox”, unless it was sent to a specific address (see iPhone).
- EDM: I created a rule to forward mail to a specific address to Exchange (see iPhone).
- iPhone: I configured my iPhone’s “Mail” app to connect to Exchange so any email in my inbox (only messages to a specific address) is pushed to my phone and I get notified. I’ll use this as minimal pager functionality.
Calendar:
- Exchange: this will be the canonical source for my work calendar (instead of OracleCalendar), but I’ll be able to ignore it to a large degree.
- Export Exchange Calendar to ICS: One of the groups that I work with and was migrated to Exchange before me, has come up with a server tool to provide an ICS export of our calendars. This means that Google Calendar and iCal will have full access to subscribe to my calendar with out me having to resort to running Outlook in a VM and regularly exporting my calendar to a WebDav file store.
- iPhone: I locked the iPhone “Calendar” app to Exchange, so I can create/edit/accept/etc meetings from my phone. The only thing I don’t think I can do is create a meeting and invite others (which I do a couple times a year so not a big deal).
So, E-Day was a big waste of time — but shouldn’t impact my ability to work. I’m still not looking forward to the next email I send to “outages” when I’ll get 20+ “Out of office” emails that I won’t give a damn about.
Found on our walk yesterday:
Found at the outlet mall:
And like many this Prius was not in a parking spot but just on a curb — hates them.
Emma’s favorite thing is to crawl on me and then snuggle in — some drooling may be involved too:
Chloe prefers to sleep on her head:
Another in the church parking lot:
