bshirley

Souvenir 1997: Socks

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Everyone needs a souvenir at an inauguration. Which one will you choose? Something just struck me as humorous as I walked by this mostly full board of inauguration souvenir buttons in 1997.

Inaugural Memories: 1977

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Thirty-two years ago: On inauguration day in 1977 I was sick and stayed home from school. Recall, if you will (if you’re that old), that this was a time before cable television. There were three major networks, one public network, and a few independents in the Houston area. An unelected president (Gerald Ford) was running … Read more

Flickr Pro Account

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In December I got an email that said my “Flickr Pro Account is about to expire”. It has been a while since I paid to upgrade my account, so I wasn’t surprised. Then it told me “Beginning January 2009, AT&T Internet members will no longer receive free Flickr Pro.” Um, I was getting free Flickr … Read more

Here Goes Nothing

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Which is to say, here goes quite a bit. I’m about to try to update my WordPress 2.5 to 2.7. I just did that over on colonelpod.com with the click of a button, because I had that boy on SimpleScripts. And that’s nice.  But I haven’t converted this one, yet.  The one thing SimpleScripts doesn’t … Read more

BGG.Con

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It’s been over a month since I went to BGG.Con – the BoardGameGeek.com‘s annual game-o-rama, and I need to get down in print the games I played, so here they go.

This year my procrastinating paid off. I ended up splitting a suite with four people, minimizing costs. I managed to never actually meet one of the roommates – the geeks don’t spend many waking moments not playing the games.

Unfortunately, there was no general wi-fi available, and no signal reachable from the main game room. Apparently there was a twitter contingency, but I was unreachable and unaware.

So, here a listing of all the games I played.

Yspahan.jpgYspahan – I have played this before, and own it. One of the many “Ys” named games from Ystari. It has an interesting dice mechanic. You are creating goods in a small town and trying to ship them out on the caravan.

Agricola.jpgAgricola – I finally got to play last years trendy game a little bit before the Con, but played it some more here. Certainly a good game with quite a bit of replay-ability. Nice interaction with other players in access to resources. Building your small farm-house, family, fields and livestock.

Desctruct3.jpgDestruct 3 – The open-area lobby always has many dexterity games set up. This one was new to us. You set up a tower, jenga-like. You roll a dice to choose one of three tools. You try to knock the tower over but not too far (off the board is minus points). This was a fun one, would be great fun for young boys.

Airships.jpgAirships – I met my current regular game group last year at this Con, and I’ve played this game several times with them. I ended up teaching this to several different people at the Con. It’s an easy to learn, and not too long game of building zeppelins.

Hamburgum.jpgHamburgum – My high school friend and college roommate Manuel came from SoCal for the Con. He was only there Thursday and Friday and was brain-fried; he was amazed I could handle two more days. He saw that I had played this game before and had me teach it. I like this game more each time I play – an interesting rondel mechanic and interconnections of actions that force you into a balanced game. And beer is one of the resources – how could that not be good?

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