I added the rest of the gaming session to the end of the previous entry. “continued” link below jumps to the new text.

Serene is the first one out the door. Holfast can be seen following three people from a distance: the two soldiers (Bombin and Roscoe) and a woman in priestess robes, probably a follower of Tyr. The three of them are also running toward something… some sounds of a commotion.

Her first impulse is to follow Holfast, but just as she is turning right, she becomes aware of sounds behind her. Voices from the White Hart. A breeze rustling its way through the grasses. Water from the Ashaba gurgling its way around the ford. A spooked horse from the stables across the river. And off a bit beyond that, the voice of someone screaming “Help!” Someone over there is in trouble, even though the cry was almost drowned out by the voices by the tavern patrons, it was unmistakable. Someone in fear of his life, or that of a loved one.continued…

Finally (!!) I got around to hosting the first session of my D&D 3e Forgotten Realms campaign.

Session notes posted to …

As our scene opens, four adventurers have come from the Shieldmeet festival in Battledale and have ridden pretty hard to get through the forest before nightfall. They manage to emerge from the forest proper just as the sun is setting (easier to do in the peak of summer) and they reach the town of Ashabenford just as it’s starting to get dark. more…

Happy 3.14 day everyone! (But especially jake!)

cat pic!

(that is all)

I have some smart people on my friends list, so please allow me to pick your brains. If web programming and/or databases aren’t your thing, please move along. :)

I have a project here at work that I need to slap together in about a week. It doesn’t have to be fancy, as it’s mostly going to be used by me and a couple others on my team.

There’s a bunch of data that I want to dump into a mysql db, and then I want to be able to create three or four web pages that correspond to certain SQL queries. I am pretty comfortable with the mysql part, and I could create the web pages/forms that I want, but doing so in perl would take me a long time.

For someone who has never worked with PHP at all, would this be a good starter project, and is it reasonable to expect that I can do what I want to do? I have heard that PHP is better for this than perl… but is it significantly better? Is there some other tool I should think about using besides php?

Finally, any tips on where to start with PHP/mysql, perhaps a pointer to some sample code I can snarf?

Thanks!!!!!11eleven

I got a new keyboard.

Yes, those are blank keycaps. Yes, it’s quite interesting to type completely without looking, especially passwords. I actually do fine on just straight letters, but I seem to look down a lot for control, numberkeys, etc.

We had a lovely dinner at La Pastaia with da_zhuang attending. Everything was delightful. Highly recommend it.

I haven’t updated in a while, but the short update is that I took a week off, got a fair bit done to prepare for kitchen work, and am now back to work and killing more spammers. I’m still not allowed to kill them with my claw hammer, but killing them just the same.

We had a wonderful holiday, seeing some family and friends, but mostly being lazy.

Also, big thank-yous to torquemada and 9thmoon from the kitties. Apparently we *very* much enjoyed the bonito flakes as treats, enough that we blackmailed Mommy into going to the Asian market for a huge bag of shavings. We’ve discovered that we like fish flakes a great deal, thank-you-very-much!

That is all.

This is a test of proportional-representation style voting: Pizza Toppings Election. Feel free to vote if you’re interested in seeing (useless) democracy in action. Like the Green Party, there won’t actually be pizza, just a vote about one.

This week, I got caught up on a number of things at work. I feel sort of accomplished.

I also made eggnog, ice cream, and eggnog ice cream, for the company potluck. And I also made about 25 cups of green tea and passed it out to people. Fun fun fun!

Today I made about a gallon more eggnog (4x alton’s recipe). I found egg whites in a carton, but unfortunately they don’t whip up like real egg whites. I stupidly didn’t read the carton, where it says “This product doesn’t whip up like egg whites”. They were right. I am not sure whether to whip up some raw egg whites, or just leave the recipe alone. It seems to be fine on its own, just not as light and fluffy. The eggnog was a hit at the potluck, but the next potluck on Thursday I’m entering my nog to compete against three others in a “nog-off”. So, if I can find pasteurized egg whites specifically for whipping, I can make that, otherwise I’ll probably leave it in its current custardy state.

In other news, work has started on the kitchen, at least the tearing down of the wall between kitchen and dining. It looks better already, I can tell that it will be a lot nicer with a more open plan. The current problem is that we’re not sure where to put the fridge, since it is kind of huge, and sort of dominates the room.

Exercise: I slacked off totally during the week, but managed to make up this weekend, 180 minutes of cardio squeezed into fri/sat/sun.