Atomic Playboy

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been working hard on getting the floor upstairs ready. And by “working hard” I mean I’ve been downstairs playing World of Warcraft and occasionally handed my dad a tool.

I’ve moved away from Stockholm — I’m now some 600 kilometers to the south. I lived with my mom for a few weeks, and now I’m at my dad’s place. Once we’re done upstairs (with my helpful WoW playing), I’ll get a room there that’s about the size of the living room in my apartment in Stockholm.

My furniture is still in my apartment, so once we’re done here we’ll drive up and get everything and clean the apartment. Then things can finally go back to somewhat normal. Right now there’s lots of stuff crammed in every corner downstairs.

It will be great to have a room of my own again. The long-term goal is to find an apartment of my own somewhere, but until then I’m living here.

It felt bad to move away from all my friends in Stockholm, but we’re still in constant contact via IRC, blogs and diaries on a community. I drifted away from my friends down here when I moved up to Stockholm three years ago, but I’m already working on fixing that.

And now to convince myself to take a shower instead of going back to sleep.

The Escapist is a new e-zine featuring a ton of names that are well-known amongst the gaming intelligentsia — the first issue has an article by Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade, where I am a moderator on their forums.

You can read the stuff on the site, via feeds or as a downloadable PDF, and even have the PDF mailed to you when there’s a new issue.

The site looks good, though I would probably have a stroke if I started thinking about accessibility issues. Also, it’s very annoying that the site hijacks your arrow keys and PgUp/PgDn keys for site navigation.

Also, the site has lots of signs that tell me it’s powered by Ruby on Rails.

(Via Pixel Kill)

So somehow comments have been down for a while, and I had no idea about it. No error messages whatsoever. Yelling at WordPress commencing.

Also, I love Ruby on Rails. More on that later.

Update: Aha. I think I had an extra empty line in the list of blacklisted phrases, meaning any comment would match the blacklist. Should work now. Now to wade through the spam comments to see if any genuine comments got caught.

A random stop for ice cream when I was out on a trip with my dad on his Goldwing.

It looks like somehow atomicplayboy.net recently got PageRank 5 by Google, whereas www.atomicplayboy.net got dropped from 4 to 3.

Good riddance, I say. I’m not a big fan of the “www” prefix in URLs.

No, not Sid Meier. Pirates of the Spanish Main from WizKids!

I was idly browsing the shelves at EB Games, when I spotted a small display with Pirates of the Spanish Main in it. It looked cute. It looked interesting. It looked cheap. I had a closer look, and then walked away with a booster pack.

So here’s the skinny: Pirates is a CCG, a collectible card game. And a constructable card game. The booster contains a pretty large fold-out map with the basic rules on the back, and a bunch of plastic cards the size of normal playing cards, about as thick as credit cards.

The plastic cards have various parts that you punch out and build ships from, as well as treasure markers, crew and some other stuff. The cards also serve as distance rulers and a stat sheet for the ship you build from it. Small ships typically take two cards for all the parts, the Leicester took three cards.

I got two ships in the booster: The Carrion Crow and the HMS Leicester. The Carrion Crow is… well, crap, stats-wise as well as looks-wise. It has two masts, and a fair chance to lose one each time it fires. But it is also a measly 4 points.

The Leicester is a big but still decently speedy four-masted ship with lethal cannons, although the accuracy is pretty bad, and looks like a good centerpiece for a fleet, but it’s pricy at 18 points.

The recommended point value is 30 points worth of ships and crew per player, unless you want larger battles.

On this image the Leicester just blew the crap out of the Carrion Crow. If a ship loses all its masts it can’t move, and if it takes another cannon hit it sinks. If you have more ships in your fleet you can tow it back to your home island and repair it, and then it’s as good as new.

My kitchen table may not be a very realistic ocean, but that’s what your imagination is for. I used a cardboard environment object from Chainmail as the wild island that contains all the treasure, seen in the background. If you want it more realistic, just get some blue cloth to play on.

This could probably be a pretty decent wargame. I’ll nag at my friends until they also get themselves a fleet of ships, then we can duke it out on the open ocean!

Well, sort of. There’s been some rather big changes and events for me recently.

For starters, I decided to quit school. Back in 1997 I suffered from a severe depression, and parts of it have tagged along until this very day. I don’t really have the energy to focus on both studies and on my personal wellbeing right now; and if I have to choose the answer is obvious.

It sucks that I had to quit when I only had the last semester left, but it’s for the better. Now I will have time to focus on myself at my own pace, without the projects in school adding their weight to my shoulders.

But I still got a fair bit of knowledge with me from school. Maybe not that much that’s actually new to me, programming-wise, but it did open my eyes for .NET and ASP.NET, which are actually great platforms. Despite being from Microsoft.

I actually got a nice idea for a programming project the other day. One of my friends is the lead programmer for xmms2, the next generation of the xmms audio player.

XMMS2 is a redesign of the XMMS music player. It features a client-server model, allowing multiple (even simultaneous!) user interfaces, both textual and graphical. All common audio formats are supported using plugins. On top of this, there is a flexible media library to organize your music. See the features page for more details.

We are a whole bunch of people who hang in the same IRC channel, and a lot of us have a lot in common in our music taste. There’s been some discussion about setting up a server with a jukebox, where we can upload some music, have it played, and have some request features to move a song to the next position in the playlist.

I’m going to write this from scratch now. There already exists one called Otto, but quite frankly it has a horrible interface and was pretty annoying to configure.

So I intend to make my own, using Ruby on Rails and a really spiffy interface featuring that latest buzzword, AJAX. I’ve even gone so far that I registered a SourceForge project for it. The grand unveiling will be in a week or so.