Game night at the Taco house part 2

Turns out that Dragon’s Lair here in Austin has a great many of the games suggested by Stephen Baldwin (as described earlier). We were greatly and pleasently surprised to see the famed Setlers of Catan there, in addition to the many variants on it.

However, and this saddened us greatly, a minimum of three players are required. And the same went for the also highly touted Niagara. So very sad. Sometimes we can only round up a few tacos for games. So we asked a very helpful person there, (was his name Mike?), and he showed us — after lamenting that there is a great scarcity of 2-player games — a few that were good.

Lunch Money looked like fun — “A beer and pretzels sort of game”, said our guide — but 20 bucks for a throw-away card game seemed a bit much for us. The Lord of the Rings game looked interesting — “a collaborative game where the players work together against the game” — but we ultimately passed on it. And finally, we landed on Carcassonne (the original). Lots of fun, easy to learn, and takes about a half-hour to play.

The deal is you lay down tiles strategically and make a land-grab, all the while competing with your opponent(s) to make cities, roads, and cloisters. We appear to be King of the Clositers (picking up 4-5 of the 6 cloister tiles a game), thus creating Taco University on a regular basis. The Tacos played 4 games of it last night, and it was fun and different at every turn.

Btw, we asked Mike for his ultimate game recommendation (which, alas, was a minimum three player game, we think), and it is Betrayal at House on the Hill.

Game Night at the Taco House

We Tacos love games. Though, admittedly, we have tended to stick to a few favorties aver the years: Scrabble, Monopoly, Trival Pursuit, and Cranium (when we can get enough willing people about).

But the holidays are upon us, and that means family, so we went searching around for new and fun games. First, we got Matthew Baldwin’s 2005 list of Good Gift Games off The Morning News. And then we found Baldwin’s supplemental list of Good Gift Games at his website. We think his “all time Goog Gift Game (G3), The Settlers of Catan sounds intriguing.

But we also asked our friends, and they gave us an eyeful:

funkaliciouslj: Trivial Pursuit, Taboo, Dominoes, Uno, Pictionary, Chutes and Ladders

twosnoos: SET [which we love] and Wise or Otherwise

doctortina: confirmed SET, Clue, UNO, Pit, Balderdash, Taboo (Celebrity Edition), and Boggle

vintagehandbag: Map Tangle and Fact or Crap

just_jeff: Boggle!

stefan11: Chess

mojodragonfly: Risk

wretchmuffin: Stratego

noromdiam: Shift Tac Toe

kangaroosequins: Apples to Apples

Taboo, SET, Boggle, and Apples to Apples were recommended twice (A to A was on Baldwin’s list).

MySQL / PHP handy reference

We work a lot with MySQL and PHP. WEll, not as much as we’d like, but we are learning. And we are getting better. But in the mean time, we use a lot of references, including many online ones. Here are some handy things we recently came across to help us with a trouble ticket application we are building, some of which is embarrasingly simple and basic, but it helps to write it out:

MySQL manual on INSERT.

A very nicely laid out set of things you can do with your records from the Institute for Information Systems and and Computer Media. Includes some easy examples.

FAQTS has some good PHP FAQs going, including this nice reminder on how to access the last record in a table. Note: the queries on this page have a type. It should read “mysql_query” instead of what’s lsited.

Computing dot net helped clarify that  one should use mysql_num_rows, and not mysql_numrows.

We learned a bit about the necessity of using mysql_fetch_row for this early part of the project. PHP Addict helped us crack through the maddness in their help forum. The good folks at Zend (the PHP folks themselves) had many good examples for it. But it was Larry Ullman (whose PeachPit books are nice) who empahsized that it (or something like it) is always needed: “What you are printing is just a resource ID. You ALWAYS have to use mysql_fetch_array() to access the actual returned information“. For good measure, here is the PHP manual entry on mysql_fetch_array().

it’s maaaaaaaaaaaaaagic!

Growing up, the most famous magician of the day was Doug Henning. (Sadly, we grew up long after the heyday of Houdini — though Fonzie was happy to do his milkcan trick on Happy Days. But Fonzie doesn;t have a neato action figure.) Then came David Copperfield, the young upstart. And then Sigfried and Roy. And then Penn and Teller (whom we continue to love). And then David Blaine brought a big renaissance of off-the-stage and closeup magic.

But we don’t like David Blaine. Though we can’t pinpoint an exact reason why. Was it the ice block “trick”? Was it the flag pole? Was it the sit in a glass box for a few weeks? Nah, we didn’t like him earlier than that. We didn’t like the “levitation” bit.

And Blaine begat the MindFreak guy, Criss Angel, and this Japanese guy Cyril Takayama. A big trick in both their bags is putting things through glass. What we’ve seen of Criss Angel, we haven’t loved. Maybe it’s that we generally dislike magicians act/say things like “oh my god, how did that happen?” Blaine brought that about, as we recall. But we confess a certain liking for Cyril. Maybe it’s that we can see a fella named Cyril getting his ass whooped plenty in high school.

Metafilter recently pointed us in the way of the x3magic blog, which details a lot of tricks, which we think is pretty neat. Also neat is Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats the Devil.

Calling on Dean Moriarty

On The Road is a longtime favorite. BigSleep666 asked, “Did you finish it and say ‘That’s great literature’?” No, but we didn’t say that about anything when we read it. And it’s a wave we frequently return to.

Of course, when people reflect on OTR, it’s usually on Neal Cassady’s (Dean) talking, his mad driving, and how puppy-dog Jack (Sal) is. Kerouac’s closing bits, which he famously read on the Steve Allen “Tonight Show”, talk about finding fathers, and not finding fathers, and “Don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear?” Sweet stuff.

Especially when you consider the opening, which we think has some of the most overlooked opening lines for any book, and in a way provides the impetus for the entire story:

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.

Everything dead. Yes yes yes. Fuck that “no woman / no cry” business! (Sorry, Bob.)

We are cheered by Marc Thorman’s current project, On The Road: A Kerouac Circus, peforming John Cage transformation on Kerouac’s work, including ambient sounds from the locales mentioned in OTR. Nice.

George Lakoff: our hero

One of the best reads of last year was George Lakoff’s Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think. (Admittedly, we were prejudiced in likeing Lakoff. He was our hero and guidepost through metaphor thinking in onlinecommunication — our master’s work.) Lakoff picks apart the varying controlling metaphors that Conservatives (as a group) tend to use and what that says about how they think, and he does the same for Liberals. All in all, quite amazing, and quite telling about how government is run and posed.

Recently, we found that there is also a DVD that you can rent / own.

On the cheap: software

We love open-source software. It’s usually small, fast, and does one or two things wickedly well.

As we mentioned yesterday, Firefox 1.5 launched yesterday. Aside from a few extensions not working properly (grrr), it seems to work pretty well. Our current biggest upset is that the Calendar extension no longer works. We use Calendar to keep track of some serious stuff, so that’s a bad thing there. Lifehacker (whom we love) has a workaround for some externsion blargaring.

We were particularly excited about installing the update, as we had installed a Beta version on our machine, which created a huge Status Area at the bottom of the browser. Uninstalling the Beta did nothing to erase it. But thankfully, as we suspected it would, the release version wiped it up.

But more than browsers, we love to actually do stuff. And for that, we look to the Open CD, which has recently launched version 3.1. We have also recently found that Wikipedia has a nice directory of open-source software. The one software that we are most looking forward to is Jahshaka, a video and movie-making software.

On a parallel topic, we love things that make us more productive. This is why we began this who blogging thing. Okay, one of the reasons. The blog groupies are amazing. We recently heard Paul Ford — author of Gary Benchley, Rockstar, and frequent contributor to our favorite morning news site, The Morning News — on NPR talking about disctractions and computing. He had some compelling suggestions, but we don’t think we will be installing WordPerfect for DOS any time soon (sorry).

But he mentioned a keyboard that “stores your text”, but doesn’t do anything else. We were intrigued. Imagine, no (computer) distractions as you type! Lo and behold, here is the AlphaSmart Neo. It seems like it’s all the use of a portable word processing program–check out that fancy but low-fi software!–, but with none of the laptop overhead to go with it. (It dumps into a computer via USB come time to print.)

We are thinking of buying the rechargeable version, which has an AC cord. 269 bucks is a lot, but we are also thinking that future generations of Free Tacos (Free Taquitos?) will get much use out of it. Especially when daddy won’t let them chat or surf after hours.

Getting better all the time: Illustrator

When we first began using Illustrator, we were so frustrated. All the time. We couldn’t understand how everythng worked. We came from a Photoshop world, and the fluidity of Illustrator bugged the hell out of us.

For a set of docs at Le Job, we opted to create TIFFs instead of AIs, only because the set of P’shop tools was so much handier than Illustrator’s.

But we persisted. WE struggled, we read books, we learned. And now, we are proud to say that we have remade a lot of those old images which, frankly, ended up looking blocky and choppy in print and PDF form. Now we have glorious vector graphics that are smooth smooth smooth! It makes us very happy. And we have smart looking graphics that are very controllable and adaptable.

Edit: We caught ourselves this evening, while working with P’shop, marvelling at how it doesn’t treat objects independent objects. And so we come full-circle.

Along the way, we found CreativePro and Adobe Proxy magazines, both of which offer up good tips and advice for burgeoning designers. And in our jack of all trades magic switchblade, we find we are designing more and more every day. (Now if only InDesign Mag was free….)

On another slightly different note, we think the MyFonts’s utlity What the Font is pretty darn neat. Upload a file and they will tell what the font used is.

What it looks like to be you

When designing online, one must get a sense of what things look like for other people. Gone are the days with the little button that said, “This site looks best with BrowserYou’llNeverUse.” The best one of those, btw, said, “This site looks best on my computer.” Because it always does.

CSS was supposed to take care of a lot of those issues. Of course it did not, because not everyone plays by the same rules (see browser compatibility).

But still, we try. Because we care, we love, we try. A recent project has presented issues with Safari on Mac (where it’s perfect with Firefox on Windows, so what gives?) So we have been interested in checking out a good Mac emulator. But, failing that, we will be happy to take our chances with buying time on BrowserCam. We have seen other sites that let you publically check out what a site looks like through a different browser, but for project development, that’s not really a “good option”.

We, however, remain steadfast in our love of Firefox. We hear 1.5 is set to drop today, too. W00t.

Here is an extension for viewing a site “as IE” while never leaving the comfort of your Firefox tab (from lifehacker).

And speaking of Firefox tabs, you might want to move your tab bar. We have yet to try tohis trick, but it sounds like fun.

And there is this promising article on How to Turn FF into a Web Writer. We are writers for the web, so this looks nice. And here’s a fun movie from the amazing folks at Coudal partners about a writer.

We found safaritest to be a good and cheap (free) previewing solution for the Windows-based web designer. The KHTML engine is a bit differen than Firefox’s, so one needs to actually see the screen to test the differences. Although, for its quirkiness, it’s necessary to have a Mac with IE on it to test that browser.

Hacking the body: fight brain-freeze and more

Men’s Health has a sheet of 18 tricks to teach your body. Nice little hacks and work-arounds for everyday problems. Our favorite? How to combat brain-freeze. Yes, we are susceptible to this horror. And, living in the middle of Hell, we are inclined to drinking very cold drinks to cool off. And, because we are children, we drink them too fast. But there is hope.

13. Too much Chipwich too fast will freeze the brains of lesser men. As for you, press your tongue flat against the roof of your mouth, covering [area] as much as you can. “Since the nerves in the roof of your mouth get extremely cold, your body thinks your brain is freezing, too,” says Abo. “In compensating, it overheats, causing an ice-cream headache.” The more pressure you apply to the roof of your mouth, the faster your headache will subside.

Hot diggity! Now, when combatting the “warmest winter on record (yet again” with Slurpees galore, we shall not be mocked as our eyes tear up, and we rest our heads in our hands until the world comes back into focus.