LiveJournal, page 2
Entries that are cross-posted to my LiveJournal page
Children cannot cease but find new ways to embarrass their parents. Alice, our 4-year-old, actually is not that bad but there was certainly, shall we say, a public incident, while on holidays. We were staying in this lovely old country house and we had got this great big inflatable pool out the back. The kids were hopping in and out all day long and we had allowed them to take up the habit of peeing on the grass behind a tree (rather than run across the hard stone floors inside while wet). Alice’s older cousin, who is a boy, stayed for a week and she started copying him, learning that she could pee standing up if she was wearing just her swimsuit.
Anyway, on the last day of the holidays we drove for 6 hours straight back to Paris. The kids were wrecked from being couped up all day in the car so I took Alice and Tristan, our 1 year old, out to the little park beside the apartment block. There was a small playground, too big for Tristan, too small for Alice but they still played there. As Alice was climbing up the ladder to the slide, she froze, clenching her legs together. “Daddy. I need to go to the toilet.” She looked like she was about to pee right there and then. Okay, okay, I thought. I lifted her down and said “we just have to go out of the park and up the lift. You can hold it that long can’t you?” She nodded her head while biting her lip. I picked up Tristan and started strapping him into the buggy when Alice called out “Daddy, I can pee her!”. She was pointing to a small patch of grass, outside the little playground, beside the very public pavement through the park.
“No Alice. We just have to walk over there and go up the lift.” So I went back to strapping Tristan in and then I looked again over at Alice. She had pulled her trousers and panties down to her feet and was about to try peeing standing up. Two mothers, who were sitting on a bench while their own children played, were in fits of laughter. Of course, I couldn’t pass it off with a witty comment because my pidgin French is awful. I had to finish with Tristan and then pull up Alice’s trousers and walk off with my bright red cheeks. Arg.
While on my holidays last month in France, I came across some humorous “Fringlish”. Check this out:
It’s a brand of sugar, in a pink colour, called “Daddy”. That’s right you can buy your Sugar Daddy in France in a pink container.
And then I came across the “Plate of Terror!” On one of my first trips to France, I was given a menu in a restaurant that had bad English translations on it and in the desert section they had for Chocolate Mouse: “Chocolate Moss”. This time, I was surprised to find the “Plat du Terroir”!
Plat Du Terroir on the Menu
Note: Terroir actually means Countryside (i.e. Countryside Dish) and it was gorgeous, hot French cheese and potate and lovely ham. Yum.
And the rain this morning really tops it off. I’ve spent the last two days going through all my emails, forum posts, web feeds and blog comments and I’m dozzed out with info overload. It really feels like I haven’t been away now at all, ack!
I didn’t do an inch of coding while on holidays and I’m all the better for it, loads of family time, sunny weather, no stress, no work and I even got to do some writing (for my “secret project” L___ H_____) and drawing (I’ll put up scans later). I’m hoping to keep the momentum up for writing, at least until work has worn me out a bit. I’m afraid this doesn’t mean more blogging but I’ll try and keep regular updates going.
I’ve been struggling with a roleplaying-gaming design issue. It’s probably just my own pet-hate. It’s something I call the “Big Pile of Skills” problem.
When creating a roleplaying character, there is nearly always a section on “Skills”. Most of the time you can choose any Skill you like and invest points into them. Some systems have some concept of grouping Skills like D&D’s Class system and Riddle of Steel’s Skill Packets. But most of the modern day systems I’ve played just let you pick any skills you like. I’m under the impression that most players considered this a good thing and limiting character choices to a select set of groups is considered Badtm.
Read More…
… in the usual places.
For TDO Mini Forms, lots of small bug fixes (including one that was preventing some unregistered users from using a form) plus an Auto Respond Email widget and the ability to get moderation emails even if you’ve turned of moderation for a form.
For TDO Tag Fixes, just some bug fixes that have been hanging around for a bit on my private test server. I also plan to do some extra work on this in the next while, specifically around adding a “Tag Surfer” widget. We’ll see how much time I get.
And because I’ve moved to a new host, I can include 
and my Amazon wishlist for those who’d like to see TDO Mini Forms and TDO Tag Fixes keep on improving…. 
Okay, so it looks like I made the jump to the new host fairly successfully. Wordpress is up and running and all my data transfered okay. The only hitch, right now, is that the forum is down. I’ll fix that soon.
It’s certainly different being on new host. Like buying a new car without driving it first and finding controls in different places and finding new features and grunting when you can’t find that one or two great features from your previous car. But so far, it looks good.
For the record, I have hosted thedeadone.net on Redbrick since about 2002, I think. Redbrick is a College based club based on computers and networking. I’ve been a “associate” member (which is ex-student/alumni member) for quite a bit. The webspace they offer is great, seeing I was able to run Wordpress (with some hacks), do Wordpress plugin development, use a domain, automatically have shell access and, for a service ran by students, a great up-time (except for the last two months or so but they were the exceptions)… all for a ridiculous low price IMHO. My new host is Digiweb and the reasons for moving are many and do not reflect on the service provided by Redbrick.
Anyway, back to doing real stuff again…
Just a quick heads up. I’m going to be moving host over the next few days and my website will be unavaliable from tomorrow until whenever the nameserver changes propagate across the web. So I’ll be closing down the website tomorrow morning and moving the final snapshot of data across and updating the name servers. This affects the support forums as well.
This does not affect MOC, the Irish Gaming Wiki or my livejournal page.
See you all on the other side!
I love it when I receive books in the mail. I have an Amazon Wish list setup so that people who use TDO Mini Forms can show their appreciation and send me a book. So a book shaped parcel in the post doesn’t surprise me. I fill up with a sense of glee and excitement about what someone send me (the last time it was this excellent Dinosaur popup book). So when I found the parcel in the doorway as I got home, I wasn’t surprised.
It was only later, when I realised it wasn’t from Amazon, I got a bit perplexed. The package was from Leisure Games who sell roleplaying games. I had to take a moment, because I was quite proud of myself that I had not used my credit card in months and had cleared any debt left on it. For a moment I got a little worried, did someone go a little bit further than just my Amazon Wish List? I opened it and it was a copy of Noumenon, a game I was planning to get. A roleplaying game about some really weird, Philip K. Dick kind of stuff. For a brief moment it was quite disconcerting. But once I saw the receipt I realised that it was part of an order I had made last year, and were only now sending me a copy.
Certainly it was a fitting way to start Noumenon. I really like it. A strange game where players play Sarcophagi, humanoid-insects that were once human but no longer remember who they were. They wake up in the Silhouette Rouge, guided by the voice of Logos (the voice of the Universe). The Silhouette Rouge is a house with a fixed number of rooms. Some of the rooms are described by a short story, a little abstract and strange. Some are precise. I found myself swallowing this surreal metaphorical setting with joy. However it’s not a book I’d let my young daughter flick through: insects, blood, monsters and metaphors do not, a batgirl, make.
The system is elegant and, from my reading, appears delightful. I love when games keep in theme and break from the traditional approach. Instead of dice, you use dominoes, which have their own mythos about them. I love how they are used encourages the player group to work together.
It’s not specifically horror, a genre I like but am not enthused by. I can’t picture long-term stories and games based on horror themes. Great for short once-off, creepy stuff. Noumenon has horror, but it’s not specifically about horror except as a mechanism for change. I keep thinking of Don’t Rest Your Head, which is explicitly a horror game but one also set in a mad abstract world. Don’t Rest Your Head drives the players and their characters into madness. Noumenon allows the characters to explore and journey through the horrors like a dream that flows from nightmare to dream to eventual waking. A difference of taste.
My only problem really is I don’t think I could get my group to play it. They’d just look at me, with those, “you’re not serious are you?” faces. But then sometimes they surprise me. And surprises are good, like mysterious books in the post.
Last night, I didn’t sleep well. The recent changeable weather has given me a rather nasty chesty cough. My eyes are sore, I’m tired and flushed the whole time. The kids and my wife are all suffering too and there is nothing besides cough syrups and rest for it (and as parents you’re never really allowed to rest).
I couldn’t get to sleep right. I kept replaying stuff from the day in my head. Nothing critical. But I woke early this morning and I was re-playing code through my head. Running through functions, testing various inputs, visualising outputs. At the same time, interjected with scenes and thoughts about worries. It wasn’t just odd but exhausting, like my head couldn’t handle it. I felt miserable and I couldn’t get out of bed when the alarm clock went. Normally, no matter what my state, I get out of bed on time. I may still be half asleep, but I get out of bed and start into the motions. This time I couldn’t. Pushed the clock away. Let everyone sleep.
What is fascinating though, is that I found a security leak in my code from that weird dream. I tested it this morning, confirmed my suspicions and I patched it in an hour or so.
Feeling better now with the sun beaming brightly. It’s still wind and cold-ish. But the dose of sunlight has really done my head well.
Update #1: It’s not my day. In my rush to get v0.12.1 out, I copied in some broken code to SVN. Nothing critical, just prevents TDOMF from running. v0.12.2 fixes this.
I’ve discovered a security risk in v0.12 of TDO Mini Forms if you use Custom Fields and the “Append to Post” format option. This was introduced during the implementation of the Form Hacker. I’ve already prepared a fix (v0.12.1 v0.12.2) for this and it is now on Wordpress.org (but it may take a few minutes before you can download it).
I strongly advise anyone using v0.12 to upgrade as soon as possible. If you can’t currently upgrade, please consider downgrading to the v0.11.1 or disabling the plugin until you can upgrade to v0.12.1 v0.12.2.
I do not know if anyone has been exploited by this hole, however I would also recommend carefully checking the HTML of submissions done with v0.12 for any PHP tags that might have slipped in the post content or custom fields.
I apologise for this and hope no-one is inconvenienced by it.
