The robot had a massive rebuild and upgrade for this year’s GenCon.  I decided to take a chance with the MG996 servos, slightly more expensive models which replaced the disappointing MG995 servos I had used last year.  I was pleasantly surprised - the MG996 servos were vastly superior to those they replaced.  They’re still cheap imported junk that ( Read more... )

It's Sunday, and Irene has passed us.  Our condo has power, gas, cable TV and internet, and is as dry and structurally secure as it usually is.  A lot of people in NJ aren't so lucky.  It's time like this that I am very glad that my wife was extremely diligent in choosing a condo in a spot fairly secure against natural disasters ( Read more... )

GenCon is huge, with far too many events on the calendar (9717 unique events published online just before the convention) for it to be possible to see more than a tiny fraction of the convention.  This year, to plan my schedule, I created a Python script to download the latest online catalog, into a search program with which I could browse the ( Read more... )

Getting housing for GenCon is a mad rush, in which all the rooms become available at once, and all the good ones are gone within a few minutes of the registration site opening. You don’t always get the hotel you’d like to stay in. This year we landed in the Springhill Suites, one of the new hotels in the convention center’s latest growth spurt. ( Read more... )

Laurie and I have returned from our two-week vacation. We drove out to Indianapolis for GenCon. Overall had a good time. Met some friends, went to some great panels, attended two True Dungeon sessions that were slightly disappointing, played a few other games, walked a lot, but mainly spent a lot of time walking my robot around and entertaining ( Read more... )

Not much to say about the drive. Long, tiring, but uneventful. Getting a room with a hot tub at the midpoint hotel is still worthwhile ( Read more... )

I have finally purchased, played, and completed Portal 2.

Admittedly, I'm a month or so behind the curve on this.  The release hype's been over for a bit already, and I've had to dodge spoilers for weeks.  But playing a game a month after release is unusually fast for me, as I don't have the inclination to play many PC games, and prefer to wait till ( Read more... )

( Spoilers for Tron Legacy, obviously... )

We got back from the convention Monday evening, but I've been too fried and sleep-deprived to have the energy to post anything. GenCon was amazing, as usual, with a few down spots, again as usual ( Read more... )

Some time ago I built a decorative bauble, a uranium-glass marble surrounded with seven ultraviolet LEDs in a decorative copper ring circuit. I liked the result enough to make a few more, mostly as gifts for friends. Then I took a few of them to Wicked Faire, where I had people throwing money at me to buy them. To meet this unexpected ( Read more... )