Magic

A few days ago I found out that a lot of collegues on my floor play or used to play Magic and since yesterday some of us have started playing it during lunch. Yesterday Mark and I played three duels but unfortunately his green deck had a little bit of a rough time coping with my black pride. Today Danthar joined us for some three player magic using my white Angel Command deck and Mark was also playing white with a bushido samurai deck. I again used my trusty black pride.

We rolled the dice to determine who could start. Danthar got to make the call and chose the starting player to be Mark. A wise choice in that situation (assuming round-robin) because you can still play before the last player and also have the luxury of drawing a card (which the starting player doesn’t get) during your first turn. Mark was able to play one of his Bushido samurai warriors but Danthar could only play a land.

At this point I was a little bit disappointed by the performance of my white deck which is usually able to supply you at least one creature that you can play on turn one. Maybe he did already have that Tragic Poet in his hand on turn one but decided to hold on to it for later. If that’s the case: good call. I was able to play one land and then used it to pay for another three mana of which I used two to cast my first shadow creature. The last mana I could not use so it burned at the end of my turn to cost me a life point.

The next turns Danthar suffered some samurai inflicted damage but played a Capashen Knight which offers some reasonable protection. I just played as much mana sources as I could to bringe a horde of shadow creatures into play. Mark removed one of my more valuable creatures from the game when it inflected damage to him and on turn three he suddenly started dealing damage to both me and Danthar at which point I realized we were playing chaos and not round-robin (in which you can only attack to your left).

Mark faithfully continued to play Bushido samurai and started to gather quite an impressive army although one of his soldiers could not attack or block because it suffered from a Pacifism spell cast by Danthar. I later got hit by Danthars beefed-up Capashen Knight which had turned into a formidable 6/6 monster thanks to an Empyrial Armor spell and five cards in his hand. I was at 12 life points at that time so on my turn I used a simple Dark Banishing to kill it. I then was able to get Mark’s life points down to one but after that I realized we’re playing chaos so Danthar would be able to kill Mark and get a single victory point easily should Mark decide to leave no blockers.

Mark indeed decided to leave no blockers – which is, I guess, a small oversight on his behalf – and so I thought a total victory was out of reach. Danthar then used the precious Tragic Poet to return the Empyrial Armor to his hand but fortunately for me forgot to play it on the Mesa Enchantress in order to finish Mark. He then played another soldier creature and brought my life count even further down. I was then able to finish Mark with a single attacker and got a valuable victory point. Danthar then played the Empyrial Armor and brought my life count down to one. On my turn though, four shadow creatures were able to deal seven damage to which nothing could be done. Game over and reluctantly back to work. Continue reading “Magic”

Languages

Intro

There is almost half a world which uses a common script to write down its knowledge. There might be some little tweaks or a few additional characters but basically it is a common script. This script is known as the Latin character set and it has been used and misused to describe a wide range of languages.

A general problem with writing down stuff is that it tends to be viewed as truth. If people would find our documents in a thousand years they will hopefully see through our spelling mistakes or otherwise have to conclude after long ardeous studies that our grammatics would be far to complex for them to ever understand completely. Continue reading “Languages”

Triple

Yesterday I went to one of my brother’s colleagues who is also heavily into producing music. We might produce some stuff together in the future but for now the goal was just to find out a little bit more about his music and the way he works. In two weeks we will repeat this but then at my place. His setup is amazing with all kinds of audio hardware and instruments and PC’s stacked everywhere. The center piece however is a triple monitor setup which offers an unbelievable amount of screen real estate (excellent for gaming too but you will need some pretty serious power to light it up).

Turns out it’s also not really very hard to setup – you just need three monitors and a magic box called the Triple Head 2Go. I am going to want one of these puppies at work too! Maybe a triple head is overkill but at least a Dual Head 2Go units would be a great investment. Continue reading “Triple”

not

Called in sick today. Couldn’t roll myself out of bed thanks to a migraine. When I was finally able to pull myself together for some painkillers and a hot shower things got better and I was still able to get some real work done even though I was not physically at the shop. In fact, I think I was able to be more productive this afternoon then I would be during a whole day at the shop. No disturbances – just me and the development environment. Of course this would be much harder if I were not handling the development for this project on my own. Continue reading “not”

Germany

I like Germany a lot and I really want to drive over there as much as I want to but there is one tiny issue: you can’t carry any ganja over there as easily as you can in the Netherlands. Now, during the first half of last season we didn’t worry about that too much. We just carried our usual load of smoking equipment and never really had any issues. Until we got stopped out of the blue for no reason during a scheduled trip to Phantasialand.

This was the first time we finally found our way to the German A61 via Venlo but unfortunately after driving about ten kilometers into Germany we found ourselves pulled over by some undercover German highway patrol. After giving up our ganja and quite a hassle we were able to continue our way without any problems.

Even after we were stopped on the autobahn last summer and had to hand over our ganja, which seemed like quite a big catch to the Polizei guys but not so much of a loss to me and my brother, I still like the Germans. So now whenever we visit Germany we smoke a few before crossing the border, remove any traces of evidence before we cross and then cruise happily into Germany without any thing illegal.

Why is Movie Park Germany such a great park?

Few parks have such coherent and well executed theming like Movie Park Germany. Of course, since the park is supposed to resemble a giant movie studio this allows for some of the theming to be obviously fake whilst still remaining in the theme.

Often, the theming is executed into the finest details. Today, we suddenly found ourselves walking in one of the more quited areas of the park and suddenly heard some loud music. When we looked up at one of the buildings to our right there was an open window from which the music was coming. We really wondered for a minute whether there really was someone up there but then quickly decided it was part of the theming. Very well executed theming though and it is this kind of small details that really lift up the whole park.

TODO: Insert open window pic here

The infrastructure of most parks consists of a network of interconnecting routes. Movie Park however is more like interconnected squares. The park is built up by pretty large areas which are connected to each other in various ways. This means that navigating the park is a breeze and there are a lot of opportunities for shortcuts and alternative routes. Even when when there is a clear path it usually has the dimensions of an American street so it is still pretty huge.

The Bandit is a wooden roller coaster that is unique in Germany because it was the first ever woody in Germany and it was built according to American tradition. This basically means a ride that will shake you up pretty well. This is the roughest ride I’ve ever experienced and even though I’ve bin on it at least a dozen times I still don’t really know wether to weep from joy or pain when I exit.

The High Fall is another thing of beauty. It was struck by a lightning early last season and didn’t see a lot of action since then but today it was operating in full swing. And even though a sign at the entrance said it would open at one it was operating way earlier so remove the sign please – the thingy works! There was even some talk that it would be demolished last year but luckily the rumors where false because it is still unique in Europe. Continue reading “Germany”

i

When my blog was off-line I was thinking of all kinds of grandiose opening posts and I even seriously diving into a deep techy and geeky topic like Erlang or Haskell maybe but unfortunately I come ill prepared. Alas, thanks to the combined efforts of Sven, xs4all and to a lesser extent KPN it’s already up again and now I have to write this crappy post to make the least out of it.

This blog was supposed to be about technology but because my reader base was changing I had to shift to more personal and real life topics. Although I consider this a good thing I have been neglecting the techy topics somewhat and I’m not really happy about that.

Continue reading “i”