I took today off and spent the morning finishing the backyard swingset

It can be a mixed bag when going to a game table blind, but generally it is a good experience. This was a great experience. The individual running the table had loads of giveaways and free drinks arranged for players. The group I was gaming were friendly and eager to play off one another during the four five¹ hours of gaming. I missed the chance to play with some old gaming pals of mine but making new friends is always fun for me and these are guys I hope to roll some dice again with soon.

The ambushes just kept coming in this adventure. Dark Sun is a place where elves and templars are trouble, and we kept running into them.

As for the adventure itself, it was a good one. Sure it was the typical "You’re in a bar together in the village and are approached by someone offering gold to find something … " but it did capture some of the elements that make Dark Sun a unique setting and offered some nice opportunities for role playing. As a matter of fact, I a great opportunity to ham it up when my character lept into the dark pit ahead of the group and them climbed back up to report what he’d seen. I’d have gladly done so without the promise of real-world reward, but I got voted best role-player of the session and won a set of condition cards for it.

Thanks to the group for voting me to get these cards; which I will be using in every game from now on in 4th Ed.

So, enjoyed playing Dark Sun enough that I’m going to (literally, as soon as click the Publish button) go pick up a copy of the Dark Sun Campaign Setting book. It’s like Dune meets Mad Max, but with d20s and I can’t wait to play some more.

Update: No, I wasn’t using "literally" in a figurative sense.

1. As it turns out, Dark Sun can have some additional random encounters due to the nature of the setting. We ended up running an hour later than scheduled but it was no less fun and my terrific wife entertained the kids without once calling me to ask where in the hell was I at. I’m not sure I’d have had that kind of patience in her shoes, and she’s awesome for being so cool about it. And if you think I’m just trying to score some points; I can assure you she never reads this site.

A view of the structure which supports the dome ceiling over the lobby of the hotel which once served as the train station for Chattanooga.

The “one more thing” from Steve Jobs was something we all expected – video calling on the iPhone 4. What was not expected was how it put American Sign Language users in the spotlight, at the very end of the FaceTime video.

Of everything in the (nearly two hour) presentation, this caught my attention the most. Most of the examples of how Apple thinks iPhone 4 owners will use FaceTime were everything you’d expect (except for that; you do that that on your own time). However, showing a conversation taking place over the phone in ASL was a moving way to showcase how this phone can really do something no other can.

Will the iPhone 4 be the first cell phone that supports communication for the hearing impaired with no configuration or third-party applications?

Ironically, a year and a half later, Valve releases Steam for the mac and gives Portal away for free to everyone. Okay, that’s not the ironic part; that’s actually really awesome of them. The irony is in that I can’t play Portal on Steam for the mac because my video card doesn’t meet some as-yet-unknown system requirements.

It’s pretty clear this dialog box hasn’t been updated for the Mac port. Yes, there is a link there for “Show Minimum Requirements …” and no, it doesn’t do anything.

That’s right. Valve doesn’t know what the system requirements are and I can’t find them anywhere on their store/site/steam/labyrinth. But they know that my mac can’t handle it. Except that it has been playing this same game for over two years.

Let’s face it: my iMac isn’t that new. It’s over four years old now and is on it’s second video adapter. But, it still works fine and the video adapter is far from being a poor one¹. So I can understand that it might not be able to play every game; especially not the latest. But Portal isn’t a new game. Portal is was released three-and-a-half years ago and it didn’t really push the limits of PC gaming hardware then.

The real issue in all this actually has little to do with Portal. I’ve already played it through three times over². My issue lies in the fact that I have no way of known what the system requirements are for a game. I wouldn’t even know if I could play it at all until after I’d bought it. Even then, the message is so cryptic as to be useless. Is this something that is a true limitation or is it as arbitrary as having a “white list” of hardware? I don’t know, but I’m not going to spend a penny on a game until I know for sure I can play it.

Not that I have any time for gaming anyway, mind you.

Update: I did find some system requirements at the bottom of the Portal product page. I suspect I just didn’t look there (despite it being the obvious place). As you can see, I did find some mixed messages. The clearly state that Mac requires a GeForce 8 card or better, which is both unfortunate and still confusing. In the meantime, I downloaded the demo for Torchlight, which plays just fine on my mac (if a bit sluggish when a lot of enemies are on screen). I’m hooked and will cease to complain about Portal.

Update 2: I just downloaded an update for Portal. I now get an error message with data for my OS and graphics card. The link to minimum system requirements for the game also now takes me to the product page system requirements section.

There have also been a number of reviews and news pieces for Steam on the mac which have pointed out that a lot of my issues are due to the fact that Mac OS doesn’t take full advantage of the graphics hardware (poorly written or older drivers) when compared to a Windows machine. This partially explains my issue. However, the virtual machine doesn’t have native access to the graphics card (as evidenced by the fact that the graphics card is displayed as a “Parallels Graphics Adapter” and not the actual card. Still, Parallels does taught better graphics support and I have no doubt they have squeezed every ounce of performance they could get out of Windows for VM gaming purposes.

On a somewhat related note, Steam for mac seems to not play very well with Spaces on my iMac running OS X 10.6.3. It seemed to leave pop-ups, tool tips, or something on other Spaces when it wasn’t in focus, and would then try to jump back to those at odd times. I finally had to turn Spaces off just to prevent me from screaming at my computer any more.

1. It’s an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT
2. That 6 hour figure you see above doesn’t really seem correct to me; I’m not that fast of a gamer.

Also, the slide in this photo (from the same conference) made me laugh out loud (literally, not in a LOL sort of way).

Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.

“The idea that taxes are high right now is pretty much nuts,” says Michael Ettlinger, head of economic policy at the liberal Center for American Progress.

Who was in charge when the country had its last budget surplus? Bill Clinton (D). Who was in charge when it (quickly) ended and we reached the highest deficit in history? George W. Bush (R). Who is in charge now that we have the lowest taxes in six decades? Barack Obama (D).

Who nearly bankrupt the Commonwealth of Virginia with spending? A long line of Republican governors. Who slashed spending and got the state back in the black? Mark Warner (D).

So do we all understand the notion of ‘tax and spend liberal’ is a boogeyman? I sure hope so. (via Gruber)

I’ve been talking for years about the ethical and environmental reasons for buying local products and foods but since we’ve had kids, we’ve also been concerned about the health reasons. We had been buying organic foods when possible (products which are getting easier to find and cheaper as a result of greater demand) and also recently went about trying to find locally grown or made products. As Wyatt is about to turn a year old – and thus will be switching off baby formula and on to cow’s milk – we decided to try and find some local milk. This is what led us to Hatcher Family Dairy only a few miles away from us, in College Grove, TN.

We had intended to just head down to the Hatcher farm store to have some sandwiches for lunch and get a couple of gallons of milk. We ended up also purchasing some ground lamb and gelato, as well as signing up the entire family for the farm tour later that afternoon. This would be Wyatt’s first gallon of milk and wouldn’t it be fun to see exactly where it came from and how it was made?

If you watch the film "Food, Inc." – or even read almost anything from Eric Schlosser – you’ll learn about some proposed laws which would make it illegal to report on or photograph food processing plants in the U.S. I’m not going to comment on these laws, their current status, or even if this is an accurate description of what they purport to do; but just want to mention that at least some people in this country are concerned about this aspect of the state of food production in this country. So what would we expect from food producers who had nothing to hide? How would we expect a company who is actually proud of how they produce our food? Well, you can find at least one answer at Hatcher: they offer bi-monthly tours of their farm facilities, by members of the Hatcher family and their long-time staff. They – in no uncertain terms – make it clear that if you as a customer have any issues with their milk, come and see them. They are the epitome of the cliche “the buck stops here.” Their product is expensive and they freely admit they don’t have plans to feed everyone; but you can’t help but respect their willingness to be completely open and honest with anyone who walks off the street and onto their farm.

It is also worth noting that it is clear that the family and staff at Hatcher surely do love what they do. I already knew enough of dairy farming to know that no one chooses it because it is an easy life. When you take into account that immediately across the road from the farm is a huge golf course and subdivision of half-million dollar plus homes under construction; you have to realize that farming is a lifestyle they want to continue. It would be so tempting for any farming family sitting on a few hundred acres in one of the country’s wealthiest counties to sell out and retire (and likely free a couple of generations to come from ever having to consider if they want to continue the family business). It has happened time and time again all across Williamson County. But here are the Hatchers, of whom the youngest sibling just graduated with a degree in agriculture business and now runs the business in addition to personally milking most every cow, daily.

At the end of our hour-and-a-half tour, our two young kids probably didn’t have any better of an idea of where their milk comes that they did before. After all, Ainsley already knew that milk came from cows. However, as an adult, it is amazing to see that someone still makes and sells their milk just as they did since before the Civil War, when they started the farm.

That being said, we all could appreciate the sample of chocolate milk we got.

Later that evening, we made beef & lamb burgers with some of the ground lamb from Hatcher and then had some of their vanilla and strawberry gelato for desert. Dinner with the family out in our back yard was the best; knowing much of it came from another family down the road.