Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Art for the House
June 08, 2007

Our house has a lot of bare walls. I think that we don’t know how to decorate. One thing that we’ve thought we could do is get some art to hang around. As it turns out, art is hard.

Recently Abby’s elementary school held a student art exhibition. They’ve been creating art all year based on classical works. One of the artists they were emulating was Piet Mondrian. I knew of Mondrian from his strange paintings of primary-colored straight lines and boxes, but I did not know of anything else he had painted. When I saw his “Grey Tree” exemplar among the 2nd-grade recreations, I was struck by it in a way that I had not thought about art before.

Mac Ads
June 08, 2007

I don’t think I’ve said anything about this, because hey, who wants to start a holy war, right? But I’ve seen just one too many of those Mac ads, and they deserve comment.

Yes, they are funny. Ok. Let’s just go past that to what’s bothering me.

Web Design Book Review: Community Building on the Web
June 05, 2007

If you know me well enough, you’ll know that I’m a book nut, but not for novels. I like reference books and books on how things work. I’m wired that way.

My latest kick is on web project and interaction design. This incorporates “design” in both common definitions: Designing the layout and graphics of a site to achieve certain goals, and designing the way a site works from behind, including everything from organization of page to software construction. I’ve recently ordered a pile of books covering these topics, because no single book covers the topics I want all in one volume.

Ear Force!
June 04, 2007

I bought 2 pair of new headphones from Amazon recently. They are Turtle Beach’s model Ear Force X2 headsets.

The primary purpose of these headsets is to connect them to an XBox 360 controller as the microphone source. What happens is the headset’s base station, while connected to the Xbox, transmits the game audio to the stereo headset, and the headset’s microphone connects to the controller to send Live chat sound back to the game. It’s a pretty nifty idea, but not why I bought them.

Paper Games
June 01, 2007

We’re going on a trip to Disney World this month where we’re likely to be standing in a lot of lines waiting to get on rides. Because the kids have such great potential to be annoyed at this, and at the suggestion of a travel book, I have considered what it would take to keep them occupied while waiting. The book specifically suggests notepads and paper for particular kinds of lines, and I got to wondering what kinds of games we could play to stay occupied.

There are a few other games we could play that don’t involve paper at all, and those are fine. I worry that Riley will be inconsolable standing in wait for everything, and that we’ll constantly need to attend to him to keep him appeased. In that case, having some activities to keep Abby entertained would probably be a good idea. So what pen and paper games can we play? What sort of games can you play with just pen and paper?