I think that Get Satisfaction may be my absolute least favorite place on the internet. I have never visited it without ending up really angry.

During my last campaigns, we had no good miniatures. We used four pawns (more or less) for the PCs and coins for enemies. This presented numerous problems. The pawns were mostly indistinguishable and had no clear facing. The same went for the coins, since we usually couldn’t use one type of coin per enemy.

As is often the case after a trip or holiday, I’m so beat that I am in no shape to give a full or accurate recounting of events. Here are some of the highlights, for posterity.

At work, we have two kits for writing CLI programs: App::Cmd and ICG::CLI. I wrote both of them, and they’re not quite compatible. Oops!

These have been sitting in my idea queue, but I have no time to think if hilarious things to do, so I share two silly module names with you:

I’m getting much more spam past my bounce rules and into my “hold for review” rules. Almost all of them are in the form “thanks! here is an X” or “congratulations! you won a Y!”

The plan, yesterday, was (all times shown in Eastern):

VMware keeps sending me newsletters. Too bad they’re horribly broken MIME. It’s just more proof that all email software sucks and email hates the living.

I’ve written a few times about how much I like Hiveminder, Best Practical’s to do list manager. (As an aside, I really need to decide on whether I write “to do” or “todo” or “to-do.” I keep switching between them in single documents. It’s silly.) I’ve also mentioned LiquidPlanner a few times. I like it quite a lot, also. Unfortunately, neither one is perfect and, worse, they do such similar things that using both can be a real drag. I keep wishing I could drop one. My mom likes to call my dad the “Gadget Man” because he’s always buying new gadgets. I try to make it clear that I am not Gadget Man II: I try to have as few gadgets as possible to get the job done. This goes for software tools, too.

I’ve been playing GTA IV. It’s got a lot of good things, but for the most part I’d say it’s a big step backwards from GTA: San Andreas. It’s clearly benefitting from being on newer hardware, but there’s less game. I seem to have fewer missions available, and nearly no random pickup tasks. In San Andreas, I could steal a cop car and do “Vigilante” missions. I could steal a fire truck and fight fires. I could steal an ambulance and pick up the wounded. I could do cab rides. There are probably other random missions that I can’t think of, too. In GTA IV, vigilante missions are much more of a pain in the butt, and are unlocked quite a ways into the game.