Pug’s Place

Give us an R! Arrr!

Give us an R! Arrrrr!

Give us another R! Arrrrrrr!

What does that spell? ARRRRRRRRRR!

Enjoy the day, mateys!

I flew my former flight instructor Jason and my brother Chris to Sedona, AZ yesterday for lunch. I had promised this trip to my instructor back in January, so it probably counts as being “long-awaited.” Sedona is about 100 miles north of here, located in the middle of the Red Rock Country; you may remember Katie and I heading up that way last March.

I won’t blather too long about the flight, but we did fly over Sky Harbor on both legs of the trip, got to fly over a landing 737, had turbulence on the trip back and had a nasty crosswind when landing again at Stellar. Now I’m confident that I can navigate to, negotiate and land at Sedona Airport, even located as it is on top of a 500′ tall mesa overlooking the city. So, now people have to come visit.
You can see a Flickr photoset of Chris’ pictures from yesterday here.

xkcd is regularly brilliant, but as a fervent Browncoat (Firefly), I absolutely had to post today’s comic.

I really want to get back into Dungeons and Dragons. Additionally, I like playing with technology. I started looking at making a projection table for D&D games, a setup where the map is projected from a computer projector (often located above the table) rather than drawn on a battlemat. In order to do this, one needs good software capable of showing part of a map at a time to players (fog of war) while ’staying out of the way’ of the DM’s ability to tell the story. I’ve been looking for software like this for years now, and I have to say that I think I’ve finally found it: MapTool. It’s even Free Software!

A major advantage to switching to a projector-based setup is it lowers the bar to entry for remote players — everything’s already on the computer, then, so if you wanted to play from a remote location you could, while still keeping the local players in the middle of the action.

So I’m fantasizing about buying a projector to hang from the ceiling of my house (when I get one) from which I can project the D&D map onto the table. I’m thinking that the aesthetic impact could be lowered by putting a paper lantern around the projector (but with enough room for adequate cooling). The miniatures for the local players would still be on the table and moved by the players, while the remote players would simply move their tokens on the map. The DM would move the local players’ tokens to match their miniatures’ movements. This means that Carmen, Liz, Elf and Crunch could connect and watch via MapTool’s player interface, talk via voice conferencing and see the exact same board as those of us in town see. All without forcing the DM to pull double-duty drawing on a battlemat and updating a computer representation.

The screenshot above is from MapTool; the shaded portions are showing the “fog of war” — players (including what is shown on the projector) would just see blackness there. I made the tokens with the companion program, TokenTool. You can find both tools at RPTools.net.

So, D&D group, have any comments?

Note: This isn’t by any means important, but I’m grasping for things to post here at the present.

I’ve been lurking on Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list for some time, but a post made on Friday about aviation prompted me to write a response which was posted this morning. So, yay, I got an email posted by Dave. I’ve reproduced both posts below.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Sedona with Chris and my former flight instructor, Jason. I promised Jason from week #1 that, once I was a private pilot, I would buy him lunch in Sedona (at the Sedona Airport Restaurant, whose Flash-based website sucks!) so I’m going to make good on my promise. I’ve planned out a flight path which avoids high terrain as much as possible and provides plenty of emergency landing locations and practiced flying it it in both MS Flight Simulator and the newly-discovered Google Earth Flight Simulator (which is damn cool, if simple).

Oh yes, while I missed the eclipse on Monday, Chris, Amy and myself were out on our balcony at 4:30 am this morning watching the Aurigid meteor shower. Just as reported in 1994, many of the meteors we saw were bright blue. I’d ask if anyone else watched, but they were apparently only visible to viewers on the western side of the Rockies.

Read on if you’d like to see the pair of mailing list posts I mentioned above without clicking off-site.

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