Jim Moskowitz's Journal

Fun while it lasted
PhillyCarShare just sent out emails stating that they'll be eliminating their "Basic Freedom" Plan, which had no monthly fee but higher car-rental rates. Now everybody will pay a $15/month fee, and pay the lower rates (costing about $2/hr less). But since I only typically use PhillyCarShare for two hours or so a month, that's a big increase in my cost per hour.

I have until Wednesday before the switch goes into effect. I'm pretty sure I'll leave (the email even included a link for canceling membership, so they clearly know some people are going to be unhappy). I just can't figure out if this is purely an attempt to increase their revenue (and the number of hours per month their cars get used), or if they have some other reason to want to get rid of their occasional users...

Current Music: Nikolai Miaskovsky: Symphony #18 - kind of overblown

The best part of getting up early
is being awakened in time to remember an interesting dream. (Normally the last N minutes of sleep are coming back up from deep sleep, thus fogging any memories of dreams)

In this case: at some SWIL gathering, possibly a reunion, we went out to a long pedestrian walkway in a parking lot, where there lay stretched out two super-long purple quilts/bedspreads, on which writing was embroidered with lighter purple thread. It was Mark Nockelby's long-awaited return-to-SWAPA 'zine, in two "pages" each about a hundred feet long.

Not as cool as SWIL 2000BC, perhaps, but slightly more likely to actually happen.

Current Music: Bach: Partita #2 for Solo Violin (Arthur Grumiaux)

Winternal verities
I should never forget that, even when you get a far-less-than-predicted one-inch snowstorm (down from, at various points in the last week, four, eight, and fifteen), you can still turn it into some fairly massive and long-lasting snow rolls, as long as the snow is the nice sticky kind. Which we got (although the flurries it's transitioned into now are utter powder). I'm just back from making a pair of 30-40"-diameter rolls, which will hopefully last straight through the 55-degree weather we're forecast to have this weekend, as a reminder that this is *winter* dammit, and there should be white on the ground. They'd've been larger, but you can only do so much with one inch.

I was surprised nobody else had already done it, or any other kind of snowbuilding since the snow was of ideal consistency. Hopefully I've set an example to more current students that what's falling from the sky isn't just beauty, it's raw material.

Lη: Good grief, was that some form of voodoo (er, white magic?)? It hasn't stopped snowing since I made those, while the storm is long over for most of the region. Just in Philadelphia and Delaware County it's still snowing, and pretty hard -- we're probably up past 4 inches at this point. Watching the radar over the past several hours has been eerie.

Current Mood: pride of accomplishment
Current Music: Jane Siberry: The Speckless Sky (in head)

The Year in Review
I'm on Boltbus on a shopping trip to New York. To pass the time, I just entered boingboing's "Summarize 2008" contest. I decided to do it as a text adventure.

You are standing in a field. There is a signpost here.

>READ SIGN

The sign reads "Now entering 2008"

( > AHEAD )

Current Mood: Eager
Current Music: Gustav Holst: Symphony in F - early, uncharacteristically dry & academic

Zip! Zip! Zip!
I sort of gave myself a new computer for Christmas.

One of the benefits to having a few days' forced solitude was a chance to tackle a big project. My iBook has been having some flaky hardware problem recently, refusing to boot up sometimes. Unrelatedly (I think), I've known for months that there's file corruption on my hard drive, which Disk Utility can't repair. So 36 hours ago when I noticed that routine tasks were often taking longer than expected, and occasionally far longer, I decided to dive in to a complete-backup-and-erase of the drive - somewhat nervously, since I know only enough to know how much I don't know.

But after hours of work, the operation seems a grand success; almost nothing seems to have been lost, and everything is flying -- literally two or three times faster than it had been: bootup, using Firefox, opening big PhotoShop files (the new TransAmerica board is ready!). It's still once in a while having that hardware flakiness, though blessedly not during the reinstall, and it'll be a few more days before I have everything reconfigured and normalled... but the feeling of zipping along at tasks that I hadn't realized had slowly decelerated over the past three years makes me think that I should make this complete wipe a biennial event.

Current Mood: sleepytime
Current Music: Jerry Goldsmith: soundtrack to Lionheart -- great heroic-fantasy-quest music

I'll have what Will had
Those of you who read Will's entry a week ago about tactical nuclear stomach flu, he wasn't exaggerating. Those of you who didn't, all I'll say is I'm not sure I've ever been that sick. It hit Sunday night; Monday morning was the worst, and by Tuesday I was mobile again, if sluggish and tending to nap. Today I'm almost feeling normal, though trying to take it easy. I'm definitely not going home for Christmas, though, because there is no way I'm going to get near my aging parents while I still may be contagious. I'll wait here until the weekend. Thanks Bhadrika for advice, and thanks especially Will for bringing me rehydration foods on Monday.

Meanwhile, friendly phone conversations would be eagerly welcomed...

Current Mood: bummed
Current Music: Nino Rota: Concerto Soiree -- light and cheery

Results of Playtest 1
At tonight's gaming Herbert, Will, Eric, Erin and I playtested TransSEPTA, using the 2nd draft map from my last post. People's general impressions ranged from pretty good to excellent, and there were some great suggestions made -- most of which are mutually exclusive. So I need to think about what direction I want to take the game in, or perhaps rank the order in which I want to try taking it in different directions.

( details... )

Thanks to all who made comments and/or playtested (and congrats to Herbert for winning)!

Current Mood: good kind of tired
Current Music: Ture Rangström: Symphony #4 - brooding, dramatic, but also colorful

Second draft

(Again, click for the full-size version)

I'm much happier with this, thanks to BDan's and Gavin's idea that interstates be obstacles.
I've removed the parks and instead added the PA Turnpike, NE Extension, Blue Route, and I-95 -- where a single grid-segment crosses both an interstate and a river, it still only requires a cost of two to lay a track. And based on Mark's advice I shifted the location of the Ridley node closer to Chester.

Oh, and Gavin, I thought about having Swarthmore, plus Haverford and Bryn Mawr, but decided it might bring an unfair side-element of status into the game. You should think of Media as "really" being Swat just like on a real TA board we think of Washington DC as "really" being Philadelphia!

More comments, more playtesters?

Current Mood: workin' on the railroad
Current Music: Tchaikovsky: Symphony #3 -- great working-music, busy and peppy but not dramatic

First draft

Click the image for the full-size board

It's still definitely a draft; for one thing the rivers and "mountains" (in this case, parks) don't feel extensive enough to create a suitable challenge. So I'm looking for suggestions, general comments, and above all, playtesters!

Current Mood: mischief managed
Current Music: Franz Berwald: Quartet for Piano and Winds - pretty but too trifling

The view from Swarthmore
Although it's been said, many times, many ways...

SNOW!

I took a bunch more photos, of the ville and campus

Current Mood: Glad the big drive is TOMORROW
Current Music: Clara Schumann: Piano Concerto -- early-romantic flash

The. Best. Bad. Pun.
I woke up this morning, from a dream involving Gene Klotz giving a lecture about the 'net to a gargantuan auditorium, with what may be the best pun ever running through my head. I have no idea why the muse has decided to vouchsafe me with this pearl, but I feel it only proper to pass it on to you for safekeeping.

It was a description of a wiki site that was seriously underutilized, both in not containing much information and in rarely having anyone update it. It was indisputably a weenie, weedy wiki.

Amazingly, google indicates that only two other people have come up with this, and one of them didn't seem to realize it was a pun.

Current Mood: Used up this week's creavitity
Current Music: Siegfried Wagner: Symphony in C -- not as memorable as his father's

So what *else* is old?
I had always thought the phrase "Democrat Party" was a recent development, possibly Frank "Winning through Implication" Luntz's attempt to give Republicans a way to blunt the goodwill associated with the word 'democratic'.
But I just watched on C-SPAN an excerpt from Ronald Reagan's speech at the 1976 Republican Convention, after Ford had gotten the nomination and he clearly mentioned the danger of "the erosion of freedom under Democrat rule". Turns out (sayeth wikipedia) the 21st-century popularity of the term among Republicans is just a flare-up of something that dates back to the 19th century, and which was favored by both Hoover and McCarthy.
I wonder what other phrases that I've always thought werre modern actually date back a century?

Current Mood: unfocused
Current Music: Michael Tippett, Concerto for Double String Orchestra -- pretty, crisp, and cool

The Jones soda has been aerosolized
I was carrying a bunch of bags in from the PhillyShareCar, which I'd used to go shopping for both groceries and workshop materials, including a wading pool, modeling clay, clothespins, and fun noodles (which is another story, one that's getting detailed in this month's SWAPA). I had to get out my keys, so I set one of the bags down on the concrete, and it started hissing. I didn't want to investigate right then because I had the car stopped in the middle of the parking lot, flashers on, so I hurried up to my apartment. After I put away the refrigeratables, I investigated the still-hissing bag. It was, as I'd suspected, one of the cans of Jones Soda. As I took it out from the bag the room instantly started smelling sweet. The can was about 2/3rds full, and the very tiny hole that had been made in its side was continuing to vent strawberry-lime stickiness in a cloud, powered by the carbonation and all the jostling. I quickly opened the can--which took off the pressure and ended the spraying--and poured it into a glass, then quickly returned the car. I managed to get soda sprayed all over my face and glasses as I picked the can up, so it's off to the shower. But I wanted to share the story first :^)

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Prokofiev: The Age of Steel ballet -- boisterous enfant terrible music

somewhat averted
Tonight Psi Phi held a board gaming in Parlors. I went, since it was the first one of the semester (aside from inauguration, which I couldn't make). When I arrived people were still waiting to see how many would come. So we spent 15 minutes playing Miles' cool variant of Class Struggle/Dalmuti/whatyouwill. Then we decided to start playing real boardgames, and various people described what they'd brought (I had Modern Art, Evo, and Carcassonne). There was uncertainty and dithering for five minutes, then someone made a push for critical mass to play Risk-2150. Five people headed off to that, and immediately the remaining four said "let's play Magic" and peeled off to another corner of parlors and started playing. I just sat there by myself for a minute, as everyone else started setting up, feeling ignored. I got on my coat and said I'd head off.

Miles gave a sympathetic look, which made me pause and come over to his game, and then my unhappiness was averted, because I suggested to them that I might play a two player game with someone while four played Risk-2150. Orion agreed, and we played Polarity, which I'd only ever heard about - it's a skill game involving disc magnets which you try to position on a board so that they're not lying flat, but lean on a diagonal in the air, held up by the other magnets already on the board. It's tricky but pretty fun and very cool looking. It took 20 minutes, by which time two people I didn't know had come in and gotten interested in gaming, so we four played Chrononauts.

After that Orion took over for the departing Jamison in Risk, and Annie arrived, so I put off leaving long enough to play a couple of games of Lost Cities. I'm glad gaming happened, and I'm even glad I went, but it was a close call.

Current Mood: back to work
Current Music: Gliere: Ilya Murometz Symphony (Stokowski/Phila.) - heroic but also kinda turgid

A rebuttal to xkcd

And here's my Do-It-Yourself version for anyone else with opinions and Photoshop.

Current Mood: offbeatly accomplished
Current Music: Gerald Finzi: Magnificat - graceful grandeur in the English pastoralist traditio

Game idea: The Wiki Races
Can anybody give me suggestions, and perhaps volunteer for a playtesting session, of a game/pastime/contest that I thought of which I'm calling "The Wiki Races" in honor of a cherished kids TV show?

At its heart, the game is about trying to get from a given starting page on Wikipedia to a target page as fast as possible, solely by clicking links in the body of the article (nothing in the sidebar or footer). I'm thinking that "fast" in the sense of "fewest clicks" is more conducive to a good game than "least elapsed seconds", although there'd have to be some time involved to determine when a round ends, since it's hard to be certain that a shorter path might be found given enough effort. So I'd do the Ricochet Robots mechanic: players all start simultaneously; when one player has found a path they may call out "got it in [n]!" Everyone (that player too) has one minute more to look, and call out "got it in [m]!" Whoever's called out the lowest number proves they have in fact found a path in that many clicks, and if so wins the round.

I like the game because it rewards an interesting ability: to broadly think about ways that various subjects might be linked, and what intermediary connections might exist. For example, I get from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign
to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington

in seven steps, via geography: I start by linking to Spanish, then Spain, then Spanish colonization, then Great Plains, United States, Washington DC, and Washington (going back while writing this email I see there was a much faster shortcut).

I figure first person to 12-divided-by-number-of-players wins.

What do you think?

Current Mood: ready to rally
Current Music: Manolis Kalomiris: Symphony No. 1 "Levendia" -- sinuous but unsophisticated

First parlorgaming of the year
Tonight's parlorgaming was ne plus perfecto. It was announced on the new Fun list (by me) and at Psi Phi (I don't know who by since I couldn't make the meeting) as being from 7 - 9 tonight. I got there at 7 and didn't see anyone at first, then ran in to Rhiannon (sp?) the frosh, who was over in the lounge. We waited in the east parlor, afraid at first that nobody else was coming. To pass the time we played the bet-your-points-to-move-the-penny-toward-your-goal game, which was just finishing when people arrived, all within about five minutes: Eric, Erin, Herbert, Michael, Rebecca G., and Will. We Pavloved for an hour (including getting Herbert to open all the curtains in the parlor (including the one she inadvertently tore down the curtain rod of :^) and totally confusing Erin when trying to get her to put her palms together - she became fixed on this bubblewrap-padded envelope, convinced we had clapped because she had (with both hands) picked it up. She did many things to it including jumping up and down on it triumphantly).

Then we had one of the most fun games of telephone oracle I've been in, a bit of which will be in SWAPA. Let me just say that a handwritten "S&M" should get mistaken for "gum" more often. The results are hilarious. Annie arrived near the end, bringing the student:alum ratio to 1:1 which is lower than I was hoping for, but if word of this parlorgaming's niftiness spreads hopefully there'll be more interest in the next one.

Current Mood: anticipating San Francisco!
Current Music: Fritz Brun, Symphony #2 - why have I never heard of this guy before?!?

I completely love how silly the dreaming brain can be
I woke up this morning with a vivid memory of having discovered a great dictionary entry for the next time I get to run a round of email fictionary: there's a second definition of the term 'orbital mechanics' that's totally unrelated to the astronomical first meaning; I would have the contestants create plausible second definitions, and see if they could determine the true one. Which is, according to the lower-right-hand page of the dictionary I saw in dreams around 8:30a.m., an ornamental method of cooking and displaying chicken.

In other news, I'm back from a week in Louisiana with eight other SWILums, doing work in the heat for some state parks and a wetland-plant farm -- but less work than I'd expected on a service vacation, as you've probably already read about in others' postings. I managed to sprain my ankle four days before leaving, effect an emergency crash cure by completely keeping off it for 60 hours, and got it in good enough shape to work on it, gingerly the first day but increasingly vigorously as days went by.

Oh, and I wanted to show off my new lj icon.

Current Mood: Residually tired
Current Music: Francois Joseph Fetis: Fantasie symphonique for organ and orchestra (in head)

Quick update on the suitcase front: It was finally delivered to me 72 hours after my flight landed, on Friday afternoon (the person who handed it to me made sure I knew that he and the driver surely do appreciate any tips or gratuities I was willing to offer them). I had just enough time to grab things from it and head on a bus up to NYC for Kyra's farewell storyreading, and had a lovely time. It doesn't make up for three wasted days of waiting, but maybe my nastygram to USAirways will get me some recompensation....

Another beautiful day spent trapped indoors
It's 79 degrees, sunny, and low humidity outside. I know this because Wunderground tells me, and because I feel it at my window. But I can't go out and enjoy it because, for a second straight day, I'm sitting waiting for a truck from USAirways baggage services to come and return my suitcase to me. I flew back from Boston on Tuesday, and my luggage wasn't there when I arrived. Since then I've heard a half-dozen different explanations: that it's on it's way, that they don't know where it is, that they can't find Greylock, that they realized they were bringing me the wrong suitcase, that it's already been delivered to me...

I'm ready to scream, and what I would scream is "USAirways sucks". Exacerbating the frustration, they also lost my luggage on the flight *up* to Boston last week, though that time I had it back in a few hours. I've never had a baggage problem before, in maybe a dozen flights with them, and I have lots of frequent flier miles with them so I'm not switching to a new airline until I get enough miles for another free flight and take it... but I'm sure going to try avoiding checking my luggage from now on. Time to buy some less-than-three-ounce containers of toiletries.

Current Mood: grrrr
Current Music: Johan Svendsen: Symphony #2 - uplifting and cheerful

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