Not really much more to say right. Iain loves being a big brother…although I did bribe him with Oreo’s to pose for this and a few other pictures.

Last week I decided to make the move and have switched sean.blog to a new host.  Quite surprisingly to me, after looking at both Wordpress.com and Blogger I decided on Blogger.  I guess it is because I am such a Google nut.  The blog most likely won;t get updated any more often, or include any different types of posts, but it is moving.

I have decided not to move the archives of this blog, and instead leave this here for posterity.  I am starting fresh with the information over at Blogger.  I will be updating the RSS links here to point to the new feed, but if you want to keep following my blog  you may want to move the feed manually.

New Blog Url:  http://blogger.seanabrady.net

New Blog RSS:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/seanblogger

See ya there.

I watched tonight’s events unfold online.  I participated in discussions on a number of different social sites, and watched the news unfold live online.  Quite amazing to watch the thoughts of the world scroll by on Twitter, and see all the vote counts updating live on a variety of sites.  I did watch CNN, and they did a great job, but I really enjoyed all of the online coverage.  I doubt I will even need a TV for the election in four years.

It’s a whole new world.

It seems sort of crazy to do this, but I am afraid that if I don’t get some of these games today they won’t be here tomorrow.  The opposite side of the coin is that they will be here tomorrow and will be a new version.  Games like Runebound and Descent are not getting as much table time today due to their length.  However, these are exactly the games I want to introduce him to.  These are the games I am hoping to play with him (when he is 6 or 7 or 8).  I buy them today, so that I can play them today if I get a chance, and also so that we can play the full set in the future.

I might be crazy.  Anyone else suffer from this compulsion?

November

Cosmic Encounter

Descent: Tomb of Ice

December

CoC: Core Set

Talisman 4th Edition (I need the update for the Black Industries version)

Talisman: The Reaper Expansion

Tannhauser: Gorgei, Ramirez & Operation:Novgorod expansions

Tide of Iron: Designer Series

Tide of Iron: Normandy Campaign

Runebound: Frozen Wastes

There are also a bunch of games on the list which are on my watch list to see what they are all about.  Games like Moto Grand Prix, Red November, Black Sheep and Kingsburg, and some of the Warhammer 40K roleplaying books also have some appeal.

The good thing is that FFG is notoriously bad at releasing things on time, so perhaps all of these games will not release in the next two months.  Sure, I don’t have to buy them when they release, but it’s more fun that way.  Nothing I love more than getting a GIGANTIC box from Time Well Spent and spending the day punching card board and organizing my games.  New games always means a game shelf restack as well.

It’s going to be a fun few months to be sure.

I am not a legal expert by any stretch, but it does seem that T.O.G. Entertainment, the publishers of Shattered Sword, could face some trademark or copyright violations.  I don’t know what trademarks Your Move Games has, but I do know that when dealing with trademark matters you look to the likelihood of confusion that can occur.

The scope of a trademark is determined by whether there is "likelihood of confusion" (note that this is different from whether there has been any actual confusion), between that trademark and another trademark in the minds of the consuming public. Likelihood of confusion is generally determined by reviewing a set list of factors…

Source: Wikipedia

You can read the rest of the wikipedia article to see what the factors are.  I for one can see a case where someone will show up on either the Battleground or Shattered Sword forums in the future with decks for the other game, and will have purchased them by mistake.  The games just seem very similar.  In the discussion on the Tabletop Gaming News article Jeremy offers some good suggestions for how to change the card design in such a way as to help truly differentiate the two games.

I would still encourage the creator to take the design further from Battlegrounds. Many simple changes would help differentiate the two at first glance. Possibilities include changing the ground from a bright green grass to a brown or grey toned wasteland, placing a border around the cards, listing the statistics along the side rather than the bottom of the cards, using different images, colours, and borders to delineate the statistics, etc. I would not ask that every card be redrawn. They are already unique models and a top-view is really the most logical choice for such a game. I would only like to see more of a redesign in the presentation.

Source: Tabletop Gaming News

From a gamers standpoint, I bought Battleground because it was radically different from every other game available.  I would love to give another system, like Shattered Sword, a chance, but I would prefer to see a new game mechanic.  Blow me away not just with some new rules, but also a totally new way of playing.  I have no time to paint miniatures anymore, so miniatures style games that don’t require painting often get my dollar.  However in this case, Battleground will continue to get my $$ when it comes to the card based gaming genre.

The games designer has taken the time over the past day to show that the rules of the game are different, that the terminology in the game is different, that the way the art is generated is different, and is even planning to make some changes to the cards to make them look different (link).  I have still not seen a card though that does still look like a Battleground card, at least enough to confuse some people.  I hope they can re-tool the game into something that is unique enough to make it worth buying, but for the time being I recommend Battleground Fantasy to anyone interested in this style of gaming.

I have been listening to a lot of audio books recently, as well as reading through a good number of books on the Amazon Kindle.  At the same time all of these stories have been flowing into my head, I have been working somewhat slowly on an adventure for 4th edition D&D.  Lots of inspiration means lots of new ideas continually working their way into the story.  In particular, three books stand out as having a major effect on what I am planning for the game.

The first story that got me thinking, and made it’s way into the adventure, was Ogre’s Passing by Paul Melniczek.  This was the first book I actually read on my Kindle, and as I was reading I used the Kindle’s annotation feature quite a bit.  A couple of new creatures and a main story line for the adventure came out of this book.  I was really quite amazed by the quality of the book, and the general story.  It follows a small group of people on a mission in the service of their king.  The perfect thing to turn into a D&D adventure.  The book is inexpensive in both paper and digital form and is worth the read.

Second up for me was the audio book of Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.  This was the first of two stories that inspired me both for the fantasy side of the story, but also by the way they carry off the fantasy setting inside of the world of modern London.  Cars, jobs, telephones, vampires, people who speak with animals all mixed into the same world.  I found out after I read the story that it was a short series on the BBC back in the 90’s.  I have added it to my Netflix queue.  A number of characters were so intriguing that they had to become NPC’s in my story.  I have not read many Neil Gaiman books, but I was very saddened at the end of this one to read that there were no sequels to the book.  It is a story that could easily become a series, as there are plenty of unanswered questions, interesting characters and story lines to explore.

Most recently, I have been listening to the Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud.  Again, it is a story that mixes fantasy and magic into modern London.  In the story, the first of a trilogy, the magicians derive their power from their ability to summon demons, imps, and djinn from another world.  These summoned beings then carry out the summoner’s wishes.  It is an interesting story, and the heavy reliance on summoning gives some interesting ideas for a fantasy campaign.  Especially some of the unique ways that the summoned creatures are used in the book.  Wikipedia shows that there is a possible movie in the works based on the book, which would be cool.

Overall, the D&D adventure is still a bit of a mess.  I have the general background of what is going on pretty well settled out.  I have a number of different scenarios in the middle, but they are not well organized.  I would say though, that each of these stories has done a good job of helping me to fill in the empty spots.  Often times it is by providing a good NPC or sub-plot to help drive forward the story as a whole.  As for these books?  I would recommend all three to anyone who likes fantasy novels.

I am not attending the main conference in my field this year, but thanks to a few bloggers and tweeters, I am able to follow some of what is going on.  My interests at work tend towards the KM and Enterprise 2.0 side of things, and the people who seem to be most active online are also interested in those areas (not a big surprise).

I have been adding all of the ILTA08 articles I find into a single tag in my Google Reader.   You can see the page with all of the shared articles (or subscribe to the RSS feed).  I recommend TweetScan as a tool to find ILTA08 mentions, although you could also use Summize.  TweetScan seems to be finding more stuff though.

I would love to see a few new people on Twitter as the week progresses.  Maybe the people who are on Twitter can spread the word a bit, convert a few people.  I think it would also be amazing to see one or two sessions broadcast over uStream.  If not sessions, maybe some vendor interviews or something. 

Thanks to everyone taking the time to keep those of us stuck in the office informed.

P.S. For those outside of the legal industry:  ILTA is the International Legal Technology Association

If the Dell turns out to be a descent machine at the $299 price point they are talking about, I will likely bite at that machine.  Otherwise, I will likely jump back to ASUS and grab an EEE PC 901.  The extra battery life on the 901 makes up for the extra cost, and ASUS does have a $50 off rebate right now. 

Way to hard to add RAM…or maybe I am just spoiled by the EEE PC

However,  if I search for Deb’s, I find the link no problem.

Not a huge deal, but kind of annoying.

Problem was that I was hooked on the annotation bit.  It is a really amazing thing to read an article, highlight the best parts, and then come back a week or a month later and immediately see what was most important in that article.  I started looking for a replacement. 

Google Notebook is a tool that immediately sprang to mind.  I already clip bits of articles I want to remember in a particular context to specific notebooks.  This works great for that purpose, but if I want to clip three or four paragraphs I end up with that many entries in the notebook.  I also don’t get to see my annotations on the page when I view them in Firefox.

I looked at a few other services (Fleck, Shiftspace), but none of them was replacing the nice features of Diigo.  I finally stumbled upon SharedCopy.  It is a very simple service that captures a copy of the web page you want to annotate, and allows you to highlight, comment and draw on the page.  It has some integration with Ma.gnolia and Delicious (but not currently with Diigo), as well as some other services.  Here is a sample of what the annotations look like, and they even offer this nice little embedded widget as well.

You can see that it has links to the exact location in the article where I highlighted the information, which I think is nice.  I actually bookmark the marked up page (as opposed to the original) in Delicious/Ma.gnolia so that I can get back to my annotations.  I am a little worried about the company going away, so I also subscribe to my feed in Google Reader which allows me to keep a copy of my annotations on the Google servers.  It also provides a very nice search of my annotated pages.  For example, I can search my SharedCopy items in Google Reader for Al Gore (which appears in my clipping above) and it finds it no problem.

I am pretty happy with the setup I have right now, using SharedCopy.  I am wondering though, is web annotation that important?  Do you annotate web pages?  There are quite a few services listed on the Web Annotation article in Wikipedia, have you tried any of them?

Edouard turned out to be nothing for Pearland, and generally nothing got the region.  I did see a number of accidents and a bit of flooding on the news, but it could always be worse.  There seems to be a lot of complaining going on that the media over reacted.  In this case part of Houston closed down, people stocked up on supplies, and for the most part it rained.  I heard a number of people say that it had rained harder last week when some storms blew through.  I am sure these are the same people who would have been on the news complaining about how horrible the city is for not giving enough warning had this storm intensified into a more dangerous hurricane.

Looks like Pearland will be spared anything but rain, and it is unlikely we will even get much of that.  At least Iain and I can still do something for his birthday this afternoon.

Tomorrow is Iain’s third birthday.  He is actually pretty excited.  Problem is, it would appear that Tropical Storm (or maybe Hurricane) Edouard will be paying the Houston area a visit tomorrow.  Melissa is actually out of town on work, so it is just Iain and I here (with the cats) to weather to storm..and celebrate.

I think it is still too early to tell how bad things will be.  If the storm drifts a bit more south then we will end up with most of the "dirty side" of the storm on top of us.  I think that we will get a lot of rain (which we need) and see some good 40+ mph wind gusts here regardless.

I will be keeping friends and family up to date on our status using Twitter and Flickr.  Look for regular postings of text, pictures, and video throughout the day.  I will keep the pictures and video coming as long as I have power to post them.  I can update Twitter for as long as my blackberry lasts.  I am assuming that Iain’s day care will be closed tomorrow, and that we will be home.

Here are the links you will need:

Twitter:  http://twitter.com/seananbrady/

Flickr:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/seanabrady/

Facebook:  http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php?id=502226220

FriendFeed:  http://friendfeed.com/seanabrady

I will change my Facebook settings to reflect what I post on Twitter.  You can follow everything by just looking at my FriendFeed page.

I notice when I look through this list that the fantasy theme floats to the top quite a lot.  I also see war games floating to the top of the list.  The games that did not make this list were mostly more war or fantasy adventure themed games.

Fantasy Flight Games is the top publisher on this list, which is not a surprise.  Precis Intermedia makes a strong showing, and Two-Fisted Tales would have made the list as well, except I am not as keen on the pulp genre.  I think I own more source books for Warhammer Fantasy than for any other system (except maybe 3rd edition D&D – which is not on the list).

Here is the list.  I would love to hear your comments on these games.

Tabletop Games

AT-43
I was impressed with the miniatures quality from the get go, an the game seems to have so much going for it in terms of simple, fun game play.  This is really near the top of my list especially since it can easily be played on my existing terrain, and because it does not require a very large table surface to play.

Song of Blades and Heroes
This game costs 5 bucks, uses any miniatures, plays on a tiny surface, works with 15 or 25 mm miniatures.  I think that the activation system is quite unique.  I have plenty of miniatures based up for the game.

Heroscape
I have most of the expansions, which means I have a early limitless combination of both maps and armies.  The game is easy to teach and fast to play.

Battleground Fantasy Warfare
This game is unique, inexpensive, plays on a small table, and manages to get all of the tactical feel of games requiring much more space. The cards are great to look at, and the system plays with it’s own terrain.  The addition of the campaign pack will make all the difference.

Battlelore
My personal favorite of the C&C games.  I realy wish that Days of Wonder would ramp back up on expansions.  Still, I have plenty of playability left in what I have.

Memoir ‘44
Theme wise, I think that this game has the entire genre covered.  If you want to play WWII games, but do’t want to spend an entire weekend doing it, this is the system to use.

Command and Colors: Ancients
This is my least favorite of the C&C games, but still so very interesting.  The blocks and a few of the battle back rules really make it stand out.

Dungeoneer
A card based board game that really does a great job of capturing the RPG feel in a board game.  High expandability is a plus, but the games can take a bit long than I would like.

Runebound
This is the new Talisman.  Needs house rules to play well, but such great expansions keep the game fresh.

Talisman
Classic, what else is there to say.  Going to get even better with FFG running the show.

Tide of Iron
A nice system for WWII gaming once you get the hang of the rules.  Setup time is a bear.

Descent
Hack n Slash in a board game.  Good fun, especially with Road to Legend available.

Columbia Games Titles

I am quite intrigued by all of these titles.  I have only played a couple, but own them all.  I think Columbia makes some excellent games with rules that are easy to grasp after a turn or two of play.  They also work hard to improve replayability.

• Hammer of the Scots
• Wizard Kings
• Crusader Rex
• Athens & Sparta
• Rommel in the Desert

Roleplaying Games

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition
I think this is the best D&D yet.  Of course, I was never a huge D&D fan, so perhaps that is why.  This is the game I want to play for hack n slash rpg fun.

Eldritch Fantasy RPG
Interesting system, fairly story telling ish, but still easy to understand.  I think this would make for a nice short series, as a break from a campaign.

Grimm
Wonderful theme, nice simple new system.  Another game that is good for a couple of sessions.

Iron Gauntlets
Iron Gauntlets gets my vote for best all around fantasy RPG.  More than the Hack n slash of D&D, this game can really do everything.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
Where setting meets mechanics this is the the hands down winner.  I cannot think of a setting I would rather play in.  I am not as happy with the mechanics as I might be, but would play this game any day.

genreDiversion Game System

The genreDiversion system offers up some amazingly varied RPG opportunities.  I am not sure which of these games I would be most interested in playing, but the great thing about them is that you don;t have to choose just one.  Want to do ghosts in space?  Mix HardNova and Ghost Stories with out breaking a sweat.

• Ghost Stories
• Hard Nova
• Coyote Trail
• HardNova
• Mean Streets

In 1988 I started playing Warhammer Fantasy and a little bit of HARN.  The crowd I was with was fairly anti-d&D and I became that way as well.  I brought Warhammer to college and shunned the D&D crowds there.  About 3 or 4 years ago I bought back into D&D with the 3.0 and 3.5 editions.  I didn’t really like the game.  I found it easier than what I remembered of AD&D, but still it was too much.  Way too many books to purchase, way too many fiddly rules.  However, much like Warhammer Fantasy Battles, you go where the people are if you want to game, and D&D has the crowds.

Fast forward to 2 weeks ago and I got my hands on the core books for 4e D&D.  I had a fairly good idea of what to expect, but I still was not 100% prepared for what I found.  I have not gotten to play the game yet, but I am working on a game.  In my mind this looks to be a great game.  Here is what I like about it the most:

• It’s a new version.  Nothing I hate worse than a new version of a game that changes 1/2 a dozen rules, cleans up some typos, and calls itself a new version.  Just enough changes to get everyone to re-buy the book (Warhammer 6th- 7th edition).  This is not that kind of book.  4th edition is a brand new game, based on the same concepts and worlds of D&D.  This is a great way to do things.  The people happy with 3.5 are not forced to change, the people not happy with 3.5 have something new to play, and everyone can play 2 games called D&D with very different experiences.
• The core Mechanic.  Having one very simple mechanic and offering exceptions to that mechanic make the game fairly easy to teach.  Much more so than 3.5 IMHO.  When I read the 4e books the game generally seems to make sense, and relates well back to the one core mechanic in the game.
• Powers.  This was something I was a bit worried about, but I think it is going to be OK.  It will, no doubt, lead to endless strings of “powers books”, but the concept is fine.  It seems to make characters more heroic in my mind.  It helps them to stand apart from the crowd better than just having a high dexterity or strength.  I read a number of things that made it sound like “regular” attacks were a thing of the past, but I don’t know if that is really the case after reading the rules.
• Running the Game.  Reading the DM’s Guide has been a real pleasure.  Setting everything up for a game really does seem to be much simpler.  It tends to follow a similar set of rules whether you are talking about traps, hazards, monsters, or skill encounters.  This makes creating encounters quite easy.  I like the right ups on quests as well.

There are other things to like to be sure.  My least favorite things thus far are really the monsters.  The Monster Manual provides a number of very interesting monsters, but it is confusing to find/create the base monster so that you can customize it the way you want.  It’s not the end of the world, but I would lo v to see “base” stats for each monster type in addition to the more customized versions.

I am VERY excited to get my adventure written and get some gaming done.  I will report back when I do.  I am putting together a wiki for the game, which I will link to once it is ready.

LaterLoop does also offer some nice offline viewing options for those who need to take things on the road. Otherwise, LaterLoop is as straight forward as you can get. You install an extension or use a bookmarklet to add articles to LaterLoop.

I was about to give up on LaterLoop, it is nice, but my reading list in my bookmarks and Google Reader were doing just fine.   This was until I clicked on the text-only link in LaterLoop and got an idea.

I fired up my Kindle, browsed to LaterLoop using WhisperNet, and selected one of my saved articles using the text-only link.  Sure enough, perfect fit for the Kindle.  The majority of the UI was gone and I was left with just the meat of the article.  This was a really nice way to set up reading material from the web for viewing on the Kindle.

I was really hoping that with the release of the Google Toolbar for Firefox 3 they would bring the Notebook functionality up to par with the IE functionality, but they didn’t. The main bit of functionality that is missing in Firefox is the highlighting that appears on the page when you note it in Google Notebook. This annotation is VERY nice in IE, but really non-existent in FF. If you look at the two screenshots below you will see what I mean.

Firefox

Internet Explorer

Mento is a relatively new service that is designed to make sharing bookmarks easier.  The goal is to take the process of both sharing and saving a bookmark, and reduce it to as few clicks as is needed to get the job done.  Mento does this very well.

Mento is accessed either through a browser extension (for IE or Firefox) or through a standard bookmarklet.  When you want to share a site, you click on either the extension button or on your bookmarklet, and are presented with a window where you can save, share, tag, and describe the page you are viewing.

The Mento web page includes a list of everything you have saved or shared.  It makes it VERY easy to go back and share something again.  The search on Mento is surprisingly fast and accurate.  You get loads of great information about your bookmarks as well.  For each item that you shared you can see the date the item was shared, the tags and description you assigned, the source website, the referring website if you had one.  Take a look at the following screenshot to see what I mean.

When it comes to sharing, Mento really starts to shine.  First, Mento makes it really easy to just e-mail a link to people.  Mento has a contact list feature which puts addresses at your finger tips and makes things very easy.  Mento also includes direct links to FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter and Ma.gnolia.  You link your accounts and Mento does the work of depositing the link in those services.  FriendFeed and Ma.gnolia happen without any work on your part.  If you want to send to Twitter, you add Twitter to the address bar like you would when sending an e-mail.

Mento has some other nice features as well, like the ability to Reply to others that have already shared a page.  Maybe the best extra feature though is the ability to either include a picture from the page you are sharing, or better still actually take a small screenshot from the page and share that.  The screenshot feature is listed as experimental, but really does work flawlessly.

Overall, I would give Mento three thumbs up if I had them.  I have pretty much replaced my other sharing bookmarklets with Mento and will continue to for quite some time.

The service is still in it’s beta stage, and an invite is required to join the service.  I do have a few invites to share with friends, and access to the beta can be requested on the site.

The first change is that I have installed the Smart Bookmarks Bar extension and the Personal Menu extension to enhance the already cleaned up interface of FF3.  All of my most used sites are displayed as Favicons on my bookmark bar, and in general everything looks quite nice.

The second change is that I have exported my bookmarks from Ma.gnolia and started working with them inside of Firefox.  The new address bar is quite nice, and when combined with a goo number of well tagged bookmarks I can easily get to what I am looking for.  In fact, I can quickly get to pretty much all the bookmarks on my new bookmarks toolbar just by typing in the tags I have assigned.  I am using some short tags to get to things quickly (newz for my daily news fix, pim for my calendar, mail etc).

I agree with many people that the browser does feel faster, and I have not seen it jack up the RAM usage much…yet.  I am still experiencing some crashes, especially when I close FF.  I think it is extension related, but I have not been able to figure out which one yet.  By the way, I am running the following extensions on my primary laptop (Dell Inspiron 1420 - Her name is Emmy).

• DownThemAll! 1.0.3
• Extension List Dumper 1.14.1
• Firefox Showcase 0.9.4.8
• Forecastfox 0.9.7.6
• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer 2.0.47.4
• Gmail Notifier 0.6.3.4.1
• Google Earth Plugin 4.3.9477.6413
• Google Gears 0.3.24.0
• Google Notebook 1.0.0.20
• Google Toolbar for Firefox 3.1.20080
• LaterLoop 0.3
• Mento 1.1.6
• Personal Menu 4.0
• Remember The Milk for Gmail 1.0.1
• Smart Bookmarks Bar 1.4.1

So far I would say my favorite things about the device are:

1. Ease of setup.  I think Amazon did a nice job here.
2. The screen is amazing.  I have never seen an eInk display before, and I am very impressed.
3. The ability to play music while I read, and play Audible books just works flawlessly.  The speaker is very nice for this size device.
4. The keypad is quite usable, if a little clicky.  I am used to the Blackberry, so thumb typing is not an issue.

I think that Robert Scoble and everyone else who complained about accidentally bumping the buttons must have bigger hands than I do (or perhaps they just like to complain :$).  It is a total non-issue for me thus far.  I have only bumped a button once, and that was when I was trying to get the back cover off.  Read with the Kindle in the included case and it works great.

The only downside I have noticed is that if you want to highlight something across multiple pages it does not work.  You need to shrink the file size down so that it al fits in one page.  Kind of annoying, but not the end of the world.

Unboxing My Kindle