Wow... I had almost forgotten about filming it. Bob Chapin came into St. Louis to do a stage combat workshop some three years ago and while he was here we filmed an episode for his The Hunted internet series.

Well, he finally got a chance to complete the editing and posted it up on The Hunted website. Watching it brought back quite a bit of memories. I was pretty much mostly in the background with no speaking role (had faire stuff to do when they filmed most of those parts), but it was kinda weird seeing what I looked like with long hair back then. Haven't seen that in the mirror for some time now.

To all veterans on this Armistice/Veterans Day...

Thank you.

We had fliers dropped off at the store earlier and I thought I mention it to those who might be interested. It is truly a shame that thewhitedragon doesn't live closer as I know he'd be there.

Monstrous Weekend

What: Billed as the first horror convention to visit St. Louis
When: October 24th, 25th & 26th 2008
Where: Airport Marriot Hotel, St. Louis, Mo
Info: kitbuildersmagazine.com
Guests: Judith O'Dea, Russ Streiner, Bill Hinzman, Marilyn Eastman, Kyra Schon, George Kosana, John Russo, George Romero, Tom Savini, Adrienne Barbeau, Dee Wallace, Linda Harrison.

We're planning on trying to make it at least some of the time.

...is naptime.

I got in another game of Stone Age. This play was more enjoyable with people who were enjoying themselves. I had a much better grasp of the strategies, but still lost by a healthy margin.

Next I got the chance to play Change Horses. This is a bluffing horse race game where your goal is to be on the horse that finishes last. There is alot more strategy to accomplish that than one would think!

I had an opportunity to get in another game of Tichu. This game was with definite enthusiasts. One of the players will take pictures of interesting hands to post online for posterity. At first I found that amusing and by the end of the game was taking pictures of MY hands to show her afterwards to comment on how I played them and what I could have done differently. I understand why this game is so popular and am looking forward to the new print run getting in the store soon!

I also had a chance to play another game of Race for the Galaxy. I am starting to grasp more of this game as well, but definitely need to play it a few more times to see some additional card interaction possibilities.

Later in the evening I had a chance to check out Time's Up!. This was a version with book, song, movie and TV show titles as well as celebrities which I feel is a bit more accessible to many people than simply celebrities in the original version. This is actually a good party game that is fun to watch as well as play.

Due to some other requirements on my time, I did not get as much game time in on Monday as I would have liked.

I finally got a chance to learn and play Brass. This is a good game about the industrial revolution in England. This is definitely a game where the first game you play is about learning the mechanics and later working on the strategies. I definitely would like to play a few more times to gain a better grasp and try a few new things.

Next, I was invited to play another prototype. This one is pretty much ready to go and I think it will be getting picked up for publishing. Just about everyone who has played it has really enjoyed it.

Following that game, we headed upstairs to the reception for some socializing time. It is amusing how small our world is... One person I was talking to apparently used to game with thewhitedragon, lo some *mumble* years ago.

After the reception I played another round of the aforementioned prototype and was a bit tired so went up to the room to take a break for a while.

Later on I went back downstairs and played a game of Rattlesnake. This is a silly dexterity game using the rounded hematite magnets sometimes called zingers. There is a game board with snakes of various colors all over it. You roll a die and that determines what color snake you have to place a magnet on without causing it or any previously placed magnets to touch. The name obviously comes from the sound they make when they impact each other.

Lastly, someone had brought out a copy of Battling Tops. A couple of us really showed our age in reliving our childhood. It was a hilarious game with Friedemann Friese cheering on his green top "Hank" with much enthusiasm.

Sunday was a fun day packed with trying new games.

The morning started off with a game of Oregon. This game is a tile laying game where you score points by placing meeples adjacent to existing tiles or lay tiles adjacent to existing meeples.

Next I played a game of Keltis. This was a fun, light game that is like a four player version of Lost Cities. While the game is really an abstract, the game board is also very attractive with an Irish motif that plays well on my celtic knotwork weakness.

Following that was a game of Stone Age. The board of this game immediately made me think of Pillars of the Earth just from the artwork approach alone. You start with caveman 5 meeples which you take turns placing in certain areas to do activities for that turn. Most areas are limited to how many can be placed other than hunting for food. My opinion is still out on this one as it was not the style of game preferred by the people I played with which had an affect on the enjoyment level.

I ran into snicholson again, and we played a game of Anno 1701. This game is a member of the Catan family, however the game play is distinctive. You have a player board from which you have your basic resources and can build buildings to give you abilities. Using resources you build ships with which to explore a community board and can create colonies by sacrificing your ship, but gain access to additional resources. I enjoyed the game, but not sure if it is on my "wish list" quite yet.

I played a game of Giganten der Luefte which was just released by Queen Games in English as Airships. This is a dice game where you are a company building zeppelins. You claim tiles by rolling dice to gain access to additional dice of various colors (each color has different value ranges) to then roll to build zeppelins to gain victory points. Lightweight, but enjoyable.

My last game on Sunday was Felix: the Cat in the Sack. This is a bluffing / bidding game to purchase the contents of the "sack". As each person drops out of the bidding for that round, more contents are revealed. You have cats of various points, positive and negative. You also have dog cards which can chase a cat away (or chase each other instead of two more more are present) and bunnies which are worth nothing either way. Our game was silly and chaotic. We had one player go "all in" with all of his money on the first auction... another player wound up winning a sack with ALL negative cats (amazingly he ended with a score of 1).

Today was a tad more leisurely paced day for me than yesterday and I actually turned in relatively early to get a good nights sleep.

I started the morning out meeting Friedemann Friese and playing one of his new prototypes. A fun, light game that he is still working out the kinks with.

Following that game, I ran into Zev who was looking to try out another prototype that had been submitted to Z-Man Games. I still occasionally have those short internal fan boy moments here such as during this game when I looked across the table and saw that I was playing with William Attia who designed Caylus. There were aspects behind this game that I really liked, but the length kinda exceeded the fun factor.

After that I ran into snicholson who was starting up a game of Race for the Galaxy, a game with a very similar feel to San Juan. I think I liked the game, but it ended pretty quickly before I got my economic engine working with a runaway victory to one of the other players so did not really get a chance to see how components could work together.

Immediately following that game we got to play Tulip Mania 1637, a design by snicholson that is being release at Essen this year by JKLM Games. Since they have not yet published the game in its official form, we were playing with one of the prototypes. The game is based on simulating the historical tulip bulb bubble market that occurred in 1637. It is an interesting game, but I definitely had issues grasping what strategy I needed to employ.

My last game of the day was Galaxy Trucker. I liked this game and would want to play it again. It is a bit frenetic as you are all grabbing tiles from the middle of the table looking at them and trying to fit them on your available ship spaces legally. Following that phase you use the ship, no matter how "poorly" it is put together, to travel in space and have encounters. The encounters are quick and fun to resolve and overall it is a game where everyone is laughing at the various pitfalls one experiences.

Today was the first day in attending Alan R Moon's Gathering of Friends. I arrived at the hotel late morning and there were already a number of people gaming. I quickly settled in the room, dropped off my donations to the prize table and after a brief walk-thru of the room was invited to play a game.

Claim It! was my first game. This is a "press your luck" dice game where you are trying to end up with the largest orthogonally connected group of spaces on the game board. You can take away spaces from other players unless they have been "capped" by a player by rolling the same space they had previously claimed in a previous turn. As we noted during the game, the interesting part of this game is that the feel of the "odds" that affect what you are going to do greatly change during the circumstances in the game, as opposed to a more static feeling of the odds in Can't Stop.

I then had the opportunity to learn and play Agricola. The English language version of this is not yet been developed by Z-Man, but the copy we played was an unofficial translation prototype that was made with Z-Man's permission (very impressively done with photoshop). We played the simpler ruleset in our game, and I think I'd like to play that version once more before continuing to the advanced game. One would not think that 15th century farming would be all that engaging but the game is very good and I think really deserves much of the buzz it has been receiving.

Next up was a game of Die hängenden Gärten. This will be being published soon by Rio Grande Games under the title "The Hanging Gardens". This game has you build your gardens by placing cards on the table in an overlaying pattern to create clusters. Each time you succeed in creating a sufficiently large cluster you may select from a set of tiles on the board. Based upon the number of tiles available in the game, there is a score progression based upon how many you successfully collect of that type. This game did not really grip me, but I would not be adverse to playing it again.

I have always been told Tichu is a game that needs to be taught and not learned from reading the rules. Today I had the opportunity to find a teacher and get in a game. Based upon one evening, I can already tell that I will be playing it a few more times over the next week. I can definitely see obvious similarities to Gang of Four which helped me to pick up the basic mechanics, but overall I do enjoy it a bit more.

My last game of the evening was Gardens of Alhambra, which I have played in the past. An abstract game that was re-themed after the designer won the Spiel des Jahres with Alhambra. The game is fun, but a number of us agree that the downside is that once you have finished the game the board is so pretty that you don't want to immediately put it away.

Wow... I know I that I tend to post somewhat (*cough*) sporadically, but I hadn't really consciously realized that I have not made a single post in 2008 thus far.

Well, um... Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone. No, I'll not be celebrating in the amateur drinking day tradition. I would like to take the evening and perhaps go out and have a nice meal with devilcupid1979 in honor of the holiday. I was thinking about checking out the new Tigin Irish Pub downtown, but may wind up simply going to Helen Fitzgerald's which is near home. Those establishments will be bad enough, I'm just not in the mood to deal with the mass crowd that will be at McGurk's in Soulard.

Let's see, what else...

The store is doing well, certainly not going to make us rich, but it is at least stabilizing out to be breaking even and should eventually start showing a profit. At this point we are tracking sales increases of between 70%-80% higher per month than was seen by the previous ownership last year. At this point I'm not sure if that is more indication of what I am doing right vs illustration what the previous ownership did wrong.

The "day job" on the other hand has been very frustrating. I'm not sure how much is due to the level of frustration that I *so* enjoy the business side of running the store in contrast to this or how much the constant grind and stress of my role in the job is wearing me down. At the moment I am monitoring a 5GB file download in anticipation of kicking off a job to process the data. Once I start that job, I can finally get to bed and sleep.

All in all... Am still alive and around, I've been reading everyone else's posts but not been making my own. I suppose in some ways I feel that what is going on with me is so less interesting than with others.

There actually are some more interesting and happy news sort of things that I will try to post about in the days to follow, but for now I'm too tired to really write coherently.

Well, overall the season has been successful from the business point of view. Sales have been good during the Christmas season, but the real test will be January thru March. We will see if the plans and thoughts that I have will translate to a successful business venture.

An interesting thing happened at work on Christmas Eve, however... We had a call earlier asking if we carried and had in stock the game If Wishes Were Fishes, which we did. The call was later followed up with a visit by a woman to purchase the game who also mentioned that her fiancee, who happens to be the game designer, was in the mall shopping with her. After a bit Peter showed up and we talked for a while about the store and our product selection (including a party game of his that we do not carry... yet). We also discussed the possibility of organizing some sort of a signing/demo event when he and his fiancee will be back in St. Louis later in the Spring visiting family.

Today, devilcupid1979 and I drove up to Chicago and back (alas, Portillos was closed for xmas) to get my son for a visit over the holidays.

Tomorrow I return back to the "day job", at least it is a short week... followed by another short week next week as we have Mon-Tue off again for New Years.

It was a long, long week. We worked very hard (averaging 20 hour days) to finish the renovations and be ready for the grand re-opening in time for black friday and pretty much managed it.

Regretfully I do not have any decent "before" or "during" pictures as we were just too busy working to document the process. I only have one small one from before from the website, but I will see if I can find some more and add them later.

( What the store looks like then and now... )

Sales are doing better than they were last year, but I've not yet spent the time to calculate the actual percentages.

Next, I'll be getting the login information and updating the store website.

Wow... got home about 45 min ago, took a shower and am now getting ready to go to sleep. The day was a SERIOUSLY packed day.

devilcupid1979 and I got up and stopped at Home Depot to get supplies before heading over to the store by around 7:30am or so. The rest of the day was pretty much non-stop working with Steve and Gene helping for the majority of that time. We even enlisted some additional help from a friend of Gene's and the manager of another store who is a regular customer of ours.

We first took everything out of the back and seriously cleaned it. We then sorted thru things storing stock and other items of worth back in the back and threw away a LOT of junk and garbage. We have a couple of fixtures that we will not be using that we are going to put up on craigslist to get rid of them.

We managed to accomplish getting all the trash out, the stock and stuff back in the back room and ready for the carpet installers for tomorrow morning. We did not manage to get the ceiling painted today like I had originally planned but we did manage to remove the display columns that were in our way so that the carpet will not have to be cut around them and possibly have to be patched some time in the future.

Well, I have to be back at the store early in the morning so going to sleep now...

We got back this evening from attending a day at ChiTAG. I will take some time later and post more detailed experiences and thoughts, but the show continues to be disappointing. Were it not for the chance to see my son up in Chicago (alas my daughter was already off with her busy schedule, being back for only a week from college, by the time we arrived so I did not get to see her) it would not have been worth the trip. But that was not completely unexpected.

On Friday we got permission from the mall to execute our plans for the store renovation over the next couple of days and so will be closed from Sunday thru Wednesday and ready to re-open by Black Friday. We continue to run into a few unexpected expenses with the mall and government, but I did try to factor in some buffer in the budget for the possibility of such, hopefully there will not be too many more.

Let's see...

Saturday morning decided that it should try to grab my attention so I got a phone call from the storage locker management to inform me they had a break in and our locker was one of the ones that had the lock cut off. We went to the locker and found that nothing of value had been taken, but since we have been talking about going thru things and getting rid of the locker this was as good a motivation as any. So much of this weekend has been spent bringing car loads back to the apartment, sorting thru things to figure out what we'd keep, donate or toss. At least this way we will save some more money per month, we should have done this sooner.

Meanwhile, all weekend I had been monitoring a software installation job which had issues. My offshore implementation team finally got back to me late Saturday night. We decided we had some concerns and backed up to start again. To do this I called my offshore DBA support around midnight to export two critical files, delete the DB schema, and recreate an empty one. I then ran a process that created new table structures and called offshore the offshore DBA to re-import the two tables. Around 3am when all this was completed I went to start the next step of the process and encountered an error. After investigation I found that when the DBA had re-imported the two tables he did so by deleting everything else. Apparently there was some sort of a communication gap there. (sighs) So we had to go back to the deleting, recreation and regeneration of table structures and had the DBA once again import the two tables (but ONLY import, leave everything else alone). Pretty much took until about 8 am or so before I finally got to sleep.

I finally woke up around 1pm, checked on how the job was running and was typing up a status report when devilcupid1979 came into the room and reminded me that I had promised to help imbri6 to move some things by asking "What time were you supposed to be there?" I frantically replied "um... NOW!" and got a move on it to get to her place. There was plenty of help and the entire move process finished up very quickly and I headed back home.

Tomorrow is a big day for me. The stars are aligned and I am just hoping that my brother will agree. This is something that in my heart I know I can do well. Now one must wait to see if another can have the same faith. Hopefully with what I have put together he can see how serious I am.

In the meantime, I am going to sit here and enjoy my Baileys ice cream.

It started off fairly lightly this morning, but this evening I can safely say that I am definitely sick. I have no doubt that I will be calling in sick tomorrow morning as I am quickly beginning to feel like death warmed over.

I spent most of the weekend working. Earlier in the week I had requested of the developer team for a detailed list of the processes that are executed during a particular command called a "pso-install2". In response I received a list of about 53 adapters and we proceeded during the week to execute them in turn to simulate the install2 process while observing the results each step of the way. Lo and behold on Thursday we run into an issue and stop. The email response on Friday from the developer project manager was "well, that is because you did not run the xxx adapter before running this one as it would in the install2". You mean the adapter that was not listed in the list you provided to me?!? I spent Friday/Saturday walking thru the process and documented the 211 adapters that are executed and I then had to start from the beginning, documenting the results each step of the way. The process is still running the last large adapter in the list... there are about 12 more small ones after it finishes sometime tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile this afternoon I went to my brother's house and helped him to paint his storage shed they had installed in his back yard. Afterwards they listened to me about my proposal, asked questions and provided some feedback. Sometime next week they will hopefully have an answer for me. At least it wasn't an outright "no". So now I must needs be patient and wait...

I so hate delayed gratification...

Work is going fairly well, I suppose. I've pretty much acclimated to the change in my direction with the company. Eventually, I'll be down to simply managing one project and able to focus on that. Sunday morning I fly out to San Jose to attend a conference for work, returning on Friday night. I am looking forward to the conference, it will be a refreshing change to connect faces to the disembodied voices I have been speaking to over the phone over the last two years... not to mention the one afternoon excursion to wine country should be fun.

But I have to admit, lately it has taken somewhat of a backseat in my mind...

I was approached this weekend with an opportunity to do something that I truly want to do... but I am trying to look at it calmly and objectively to decide if I can successfully make it happen. So now I am gathering information, asking advice, researching and trying to figure out viable economic options.

Passion and belief can take you quite a ways... but there is a limit and eventually cold, hard reality has to be dealt with.

devilcupid1979 and I headed over to Kansas City this weekend to visit our friends J&S and attend the Kansas City Renaissance Festival. We drove over on Friday to enjoy some relaxed time catching up with J&S and see their new house with impressive home theater system.

Due to various time constraints we were only able to make it to the faire site on Saturday, having to head back early on Sunday. Even tho it was Celtic weekend, due to the weather forecast calling for 88 and sunny, I decided to forgo the kilt and wear the shiny beaded doublet that the extremely talented imbri6 made for me.

It is always great seeing so many friends at KCRF... Right after cannon we met up with our friend Carlos (the ludite without LJ-ness), also from St. Louis, just inside front gate to spend much of our day with and I managed to see brotherwilliam & ladyniniane, rowangolightly & thebruce, eacole72 & Ray, mesniu, ardantheblack, and malvito. Alas, I wanted to say "hi" to duane_kc and wish rdnkangel a happy birthday but could find neither at Mother Pockets. There were many others that I would have liked to have seen but never found wandering the streets.

It is interesting observing the many changes in cast and merchant staff over the last few years. I suppose it seemed even more pronounced having missed the entire run last year. It is also a bit odd walking the streets at times. Having worked the faire for a few years, I don't exactly feel like I "fit in" as a playtron, but at the same time I am not working the faire and so am not a part of the faire either.

I suppose it is similar to the "out of sorts" feeling I get when I visit GSLRF, tho that feeling tends to be even stronger there.

After dinner on Saturday we headed back to our friends' house and watched Hot Fuzz, a movie we had not yet seen. I have to admit I did enjoy it... maybe I shouldn't have admitted that.

Overall, it was a good weekend, 'tis a shame that the real world stress returns all too soon.