Huh. It looks like I haven’t written a todo list for the year since 2008. I don’t know whether I wish I had, but I’m a bit surprised. I’m going to list some things from my lists 2005-2008 that I did not accomplish and start there.

For Christmas, Gloria gave me an Arduino Starter Kit! It’s got an Arduino Uni, a bunch of wires, some resistors and LEDs and stuff, a motor, and I don’t know what else yet. I hadn’t been very intereted in Arduino until Rob Blackwell was giving a pretty neat demo at the “Quack and Hack” at DuckDuckGo last year. Still, I knew it would just be another thing to eat up my time, and I decided to stay away. Finally, though, I started having ideas of things that might be fun, but not too ambitious. I put the starter kit on my Christmas wish list and I got the Arduino Workshop book for cheap from O’Reilly.

At YAPC::NA in Austin this year, I ran a sorta-D&D game on game night. I have been meaning to write it up nicely, but I think it’s just not going to happen, so I’m going to write it up badly. Here we go…

Last week, I was thinking about how sometimes I do something I have to do and then feel great, and sometimes I do something I have to do and then feel lousy. I decided I should keep track of what I do and how it makes me feel. (I have some dark predictions, but am trying to hold off until I have more recorded.) To do this, I needed a way to record the facts, and it needed to be really, really easy to use. I’d never take the time to say “I did something” if it was a hassle.

At OSCON this past year, I was a just little surprised by the still-shrinking Perl track. What really surprised me, though, was the entirely absent Ruby track. I tried to figure out what it meant, and whether it meant anything, but I didn’t come to any conclusions. Even if I’d more carefully collected actual data, I’m not sure I could’ve made any really useful conclusions.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve done a bit of pair programming across the Internet, which I haven’t done in years. It was great! Most of this was with Ingy döt Net and Frew Schmidt.

I picked up DEFCON a few months ago on Steam. It’s a game inspired by the “big nuclear war boards” we saw in movies like Dr. Strangelove or, closer to the mark, WarGames. Each player controls a section of the world. The game starts with a few very short bits of placing units and quickly turns into a shooting war. Players launch fighters, deploy fleets, and eventually sound out bombers, subs, and ICBMs. The game looks gorgeous.

Over a decade ago, Paul Elliott wrote a tiny piece of counterfactual history called The Gygax/Arneson Tapes. It recounts the history of the world’s most famous role-playing game, Mazes & Minotaurs, in which the players take on larger-than-life Greek-style heroes in Sword and Sandal adventures.

I don’t use Module::Install or Module::Starter anymore. For the most part, I don’t think anyone should. I think there are better tools to use instead.

Preface