Time Capsule

I’ve had this draft sitting around since we got the Time Capsule. Might as well polish and post...

The NetGear wireless router we had—while fine feature-wise—had problems. Weekly, it would refuse wireless connections until you poked at it’s configuration. (You didn’t have to actually change the configuration.) It’d periodically just run slow until you power cycled it. I kept installing firmware updates, but the problems always remained.

We’d been needing a network disk to back-up our machines to as well. So, when the Time Capsule was announced, I wanted one. When I got some Apple Store credit as a work bonus, my beautiful—then Apple Store employed—wife brilliantly suggested that combined with her discount, we could afford one sooner than I’d expected.

When it arrived, setup was a very pleasant experience. Easier than any other wireless router I’ve setup. I soon had it up with the same network name and network password as I’d used with the NetGear. (Thus, no need to reconfigure the Macs or iPhones.) Even our USB printer—which never worked great with our Macs—was soon connected to the Time Capsule taking the “network print server” duties from my Mac mini. I was soon connected to the Time Capsule’s hard drive and backing up my Mac mini. (I was waiting until I could back it up before installing Leopard so that I could use Time Machine.) Setting up Time Machine on Andrea’s iBook to work with the Time Capsule went easy too.

OK, one little hiccup there. The initial Time Machine backup can take a long time. Probably the old iBook’s old AirPort card was a factor as well. I stopped it and connected it via ethernet instead. It still took a long time, but not as long as it would have. Still, that isn’t a fault in the product.

Ironically, Andrea told me that Time Capsule generated a lot of support calls. I have to assume that that is more due to the nature of the product—network, especially wireless networking, can be mysterious to a lot of users—than the product itself. If someone has trouble setting up a Time Capsule, they’d probably have even more trouble with...say...a NetGear one. (Not even considering the additional network disk and network printer features of the Time Capsule.)

So, I finally have a permanent fix for the problems with the my NetGear router. (^_^)

Superdelegates

If superdelegates weren’t meant to be independent, why do they exist as independent delegates? If you don’t like independent delegates, then shouldn’t you be working to eliminate superdelegates rather than trying to tell them how they should vote?

Where are the stories?

I’ve written about this before, but it—unsurprisingly—comes to mind again.

Probably any more-than-casual D&D player has read a story from Gygax’s Greyhawk campaign. (Not the published setting, but the actual campaign run by Gygax and Kuntz.) One of the earliest magazine articles about the game included one. They were told in the pages of The Dragon magazine. They were told in modules. They were told even in relatively recent issues of Dragon magazine.

Do some searching, and you can find a few stories from Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign.

Despite a lot of searching, though, I haven’t found a story from Marc Miller’s personal Traveller campaign or Steve Jackson’s personal GURPS campaign.

(Interestingly, a pre-GURPS SJG game, Melee, did open with a story taken from actual play!)

Perhaps those designers feel it would be inappropriately vain to talk about their games and good enough to let people create their own stories.

But such stories are, I think, important to communicate aspects of the game—as played by its creators—that the rules and advice alone do not. They certainly help breathe a life into it. Not that we then have to play as the creators do, but I think there’s still a lot of value in such stories.

More recently it’s become popular to make up stories to try to give a game more life, but it doesn’t work for me the way the stories of Gygax and Kuntz and company do.

Exclusive

Note to self: If you need to say “monopoly” without saying “monopoly”, say “exclusive”. (^_^)

EGG

He wrote some of the most influential books ([1][2][3] to cite a few) of my teenage years. (And was credited on others.)

There was a time (the Unearthed Arcana era) that I came to ridicule him.

I was very saddened the day I learned he’d been forced out of the company he’d built.

Then I came to respect him through his message board posts.

In the end, he was an interesting man and a vibrant spirit whose influence was great. (For it can be seen perhaps stronger in computer and console games than in the pen and paper games he created.) While he certainly achieved nothing single-handedly, I don’t think a knowledgeable observer can discount his contributions.

I am sad that I never got to meet him face-to-face or to game with him. I am grateful for his works that fill my shelves and for the conversations that he shared with me and others online. As just another gamer.

Good bye, Gary. You will be missed.

The role of stats in RPGs

Heracles often completed his labors through his ingenuity rather than his great strength. Goliath’s great physical stature and strength didn’t prevent him from being defeated by a confident youngster. (And the story kind of loses its power if you read it as David just being lucky—rolling a critical hit.)

You see this kind of thing in comic books all the time. While the Fantastic Four have truly fantastic abilities, Lee and Kirby felt the need to create an enemy of cosmic proportions to pit them against. An enemy against whom their abilities meant very little.

In text adventures—or “interactive fiction”— the “player character” seldom has any stats.

While I can enjoy the numbers game part of role-playing games, I don’t think it’s crucial. (For me.) Ideally, I don’t think it’s the characters stats that should determine success but how the character is played. I suppose this is what we call “challenging the player” rather than “challenging the character”.

(Of course, it’s not an all-or-nothing affair. If the player is really “role playing”, then I suppose the two merge into “challenging the character as played by the player”. A player can play a character in a way that plays to their statistical advantages and minimizes their disadvantages. But I don’t think that makes much different to the point I’m trying to understand.)

During my Lord of the Rings campaign, I ran a solo play-by-e-mail bit for one of the players (Jax) whose character was doing some scouting alone. Never rolled a die. In the classic Traveller and Basic/Expert D&D games I ran, I tended to downplay the important of stats.

(Then there’s the whole stat advancement thing. If stats are downplayed, then isn’t stat advancement as well?)

Mouse buttons and iPhone apps

Macs come with a single-button mouse. If you upgrade to a two-button mouse, however, the system supports it just fine. Apple will even sell you a mouse that has a two-button mode.

It would be nice to see the same thing with third-party iPhone applications. If Apple—as is expected—will have a process for approving third-party applications to make sure they aren’t naughty, I think that will be a great thing.

But I also think that those of us willing to take more risk ought to have the option of installing unapproved applications.

A good argument against this, however, is that everybody will choose to take the risk without understanding it. The approval process will be pointless and chaos will ensue.

Take the Windows 95 logo. When Windows 95 came out, developers who went through an approval process could put a special Windows 95 logo on their product. End users, however, didn’t care, however, so it really didn’t mean anything.

(Aside: It probably didn’t really mean anything anyway.)

Did chaos ensue? I guess it depends on how you look at it. Things were no more chaotic than they had been under Windows 3.11.

Back to mouse buttons, though. It was a long time between the introduction of the Macintosh and Apple selling a mouse with two-button capabilities. It was also a long time before the system truly supported a two-button mouse without third-party enhancements. Perhaps that made it easier for the current situation to develop?

Well, it’s perhaps a strained analogy anyway, but this is a common situation that comes up in human-machine interaction: Balancing the machine’s interface between the needs of the “casual” and the “power” user and how much to allow it to adapt to both.