Drinking and playing D&D (within walking distance of the hotel!)

More later!

Tonight was a night of preparation… getting packed, getting the dog over to our friend’s house, checking the itinerary… all of that work is done and we are ready for GenCon!  I must say I am very excited to have an opportunity to relax, game with friends, and potentially meet some gaming and nerd-culture legends.

This year will hopefully be marked by getting to meet Wil Wheaton, running our event (which is getting good buzz so far), and gaming with the old crew from IL.  We’re going to revisit our first campaign setting with a few new twists.  We get to meet up with some friends that we made over the last few years in the RPG Blogosphere, its going to be great!

I’d best crash since our flight leaves early.  The next update you get will be from GenCon… wooot!

August 2, 2010: at long last, a day without drama at the office.  No major flare-ups, no urgent bugs, no insane meeting load… nothing.  I got a good solid swath of time to focus on debugging some new code that has been done and we found a handful of issues with it, so I actually got to add some value today.  Without going into too much detail, we actually got some important data to load today and I got to be a part of it.  Exciting.

In other news, Tasha and I are packing for GenCon today.  I’m really looking forward to a vacation, and only one more work day to survive through!  Woot!

We had a communication breakdown regarding our Amethyst game that we were going to play in today.  Apparently we got the time wrong and missed the session, arriving an hour before the gaming store closed.  That’s OK though, we made the most of the rest of our day.  I grilled some steaks that were just as fabulous as Friday, and Tasha and I went to Target to get some new clothes.

When we got home, we elected for a nap and then ordered pizza and are now watching Big Brother reruns.

Only two days before we head to GenCon!!

This weekend is our warmup to GenCon, we had a long (10 am to 9 pm) jag at our local gaming shop and more tomorrow!  I got to try out my Living Forgotten Realms character before he gets to go to the big dance at the convention, and we got a chance to play in a homebrew campaign that our dungeon master created.  It was a great story and a lot of fun!

Tomorrow the party continues, with our first introduction to the Amethyst setting.  I’m looking forward to it, as it is considerably different from regular D&D.  Variety is a good thing!  More soon!

This has been a constantly annoying and frustrating series of weeks at work.  Things never went quite right, and for some reason I have been internalizing the blame for the problems.  Technically, as one of my coworkers pointed out to me, it is the whole user story team that succeeds or fails when these things go wrong but I had more to do with this codebase so I feel more responsible.  I thought briefly that I might get through today without any major drama or flare up, but as if by script 30 minutes before the end of the day something else went wrong.

Oh well, at least it is the weekend and I’ve got GenCon coming up.  I’ve only got a two-day work week next week, then I’m away on vacation followed immediately by a trip to Peoria.  The trip to Peoria for work is much needed, and I get to stay an extra day to spend some more time with my family.  It will be nice to see everyone and even nicer to have some relaxing time without enduring the office stress.

It’s annual review time again, so I’m busy getting my write-up put together.  Tasha and I had a very lazy evening tonight, opting to take a nap after work and then we hit up Chick-fil-A so I had enough energy to endure writing a boring document all night.  Sadly, I’m not much more exciting than this tonight so I’ll leave it here for now.

This week has been going by at a furious pace.  Excessively annoying bugs, conflicting priorities, and some administrative stuff that must be done before I go to GenCon adds up to a lot of work related frustration for me.  The good news is that vacation is coming up, followed immediately by a trip back to Illinois for work.

I’m looking forward to seeing the old crew in Peoria and spending at least a few days with my parents and family at the end of the week.

Aside from that, I don’t have much else to report.  Tonight was D&D Encounters and it was very fun.  This weekend is going to be a big pile of gaming thanks to some events at our local gaming store.  Hopefully most of my work will be done by then, but only time will tell.

Tonight was a hot one. They are doing construction on the studio where we train, so the air conditioner was off. One of our dojomates is testing for Shodan this weekend, so tonight was a workout focused on his test preparation.

He is 15, getting ready for his first Shodan exam so it was fun to help him get prepared.

Basics, jyu ippon kumite, and a ton of kata rounded out the night. My stance was totally screwed over tonight for some reason, the only one that felt and looked decent was Sochin-dachi. Oh well, something to work on next time.

Tonight we returned to the gym, where I ran a relatively slow mile (10:17) and then lifted some weights.  We only did a few machines, it was pretty full up there so PW and I went downstairs and played a little basketball.  It was nice to work out again, and I’m eager for the dojo tomorrow night.

That’s about all there is from me right now, not much else to report!