Axodys 10C Edition

Made a ton of progress on my garden shed building project over the last four days. I still need to pick up one board at Home Depot on the way home tonight as I'm short a final six foot piece, but otherwise the roof is ready for the final metal layer. I'm actually planning to put down roofing felt first underneath the metal, particularly since my mom had an entire unused roll left at her house. I'm hopeful that it will be enough to cover the whole thing up.

As far as the metal roofing goes I'm going to attempt to recycle some of the siding and roofing from our current metal garden shed after I disassemble it. I'm cautiously optimistic that this will work out, but I'm operating purely on guesswork and estimation at this point. I'll have a much clearer sense of things once the old garden shed is apart and I can fully measure and test the individual metal sheets.

On a funny hardware note I used almost $40 worth of deck screws to assemble the roof. A pound of 3" screws to attach the rafters to the top of the walls and 5 pounds worth of 1-5/8" screws to attach all the cross boards to the top of the rafters. My Craftsman portable Li-Ion Drill has been a serious trooper and even survived a longer than desirable fall!

I listen to a lot of podcasts during the day while I’m working and particularly when I go out on runs. Here are some of my current favorites in no particular order.

TeeVee (Speedy Arrowcast)

This a little bit of an oddity in that it’s a subset of the greater TeeVee podcast feed that encompasses several other podcasts about television shows (many of which I also listen to like the discontinued one about The Flash and the new one about the Defenders). In this case I’m singling out the TeeVee episodes hosted by Dan Moren, Guy English, and John Moltz that cover the CW’s first DC Universe show, Arrow. Those three Biffs¹ provide consistently funny and interesting analysis of my current favorite broadcast tv superhero show.

Clash of the Type-Ins

The premise is straightforward: Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna play through text adventures while the game author guest hosts and narrates the game. If you’re a fan of the interactive fiction games like I am it’s pretty awesome to listen in as they play, discuss, and deconstruct the games. Ryan has written a ton of games himself and often swaps roles with his guests to narrate one of his own text adventures in follow up episodes.

Eaten by a Grue

This is actually the podcast that lead me to Clash of the Type-Ins. Kevin Savetz and Carrington Vanston discuss and review classic Infocom games, text adventures, and interactive fiction. If I had more free time I would play more games like this, but since I don’t, listening to podcasts about them makes for a pretty good substitute.

GM Word of the Week

I’ve been on a bit of a Dungeons & Dragons media kick over the last six months or so and this podcast was a happy discovery along the way. Written by The Angry GM and produced by Fiddleback this podcast is a highly entertaining weekly rabbit hole into the history, mythology, gaming, and pop culture ties of words like doppelgänger, eldritch, mana, drow, ranger, dragon, and so much more.

The Adventure Zone

The McElroy brothers are most famous for another podcast that they do², but the idea of these funny guys teaming up with their dad to play Dungeons & Dragons together was too good for me to pass up. The result is an entertaining show with an offbeat fantasy storyline, and fun community interaction.

Lore

"Lore exposes the darker side of history, exploring the creatures, people, and places of our wildest nightmares."

Aaron Mahnke’s hit podcast is probably the most mainstream thing I listen to, but I got on board fairly early before things really blew up. The subject matter isn’t always my favorite, but I admire his storytelling skill and approach to the material. I’ve been thrilled to watch this podcast take him from struggling indie graphic designer who writes and podcasts on the side into a full time writer and podcaster with an Amazon Prime show coming in October. I can’t wait to see how Lore translates to the television screen.

Analog(ue)

A Casey Liss - Myke Hurley collaboration about the human side of living in an increasingly technological world. This one shows up on my phone every other Sunday and it’s always exactly what I want to hear during the most relaxing day of the week.

1. Readers of the podcast will understand what a high compliment this is!

2. My Brother, My Brother, and Me (MBMBaM) which at the the time of this writing I have never actually listened to. I have an aversion to what I consider hyper successful or borderline mainstream podcasts like This American Life, Serial, etc. There are exceptions if I feel like I can get in on the podcast somewhat early, (or I just like the premise/material- looking at you S-Town) but otherwise I chafe at the idea of giving my limited listening time to the podcasting 1%.

I knew that the anniversary of my first post on axodys.com had to be coming up, but I hadn’t gotten around to checking my archives until today. Turns out that January 24 is in fact its birthday.

This site got its start as a place for me to play around with html and the web at my very own domain. But it’s been a blog from the beginning, and I realized this pretty quickly. While I linked to various interesting sites from the first post on, I also treated my blog a lot more like an open journal than I do now.

Thinking back I’m impressed that I stuck with it at all considering how crude the process was. I updated everything manually at first, then eventually burned out on the process. Eventually Blogger came out and by late October of 1999 I was able to use their groundbreaking system to handle my updates.

Since that first couple years my posting frequency gradually waned which seems strange when you consider how much blogging and news gathering technology has improved in that span. But despite my tendencies towards consumption rather than blogging productivity, I’ve never abandoned the site and don’t expect to any time soon. I don’t have any concrete plans for more writing this year or the next, but I expect the blog will carry on much like it always has– one post at a time.

Joel Spolsky: Killing patents with Ask Patents

My dream is that when big companies hear about how friggin’ easy it is to block a patent application, they’ll use Ask Patents to start messing with their competitors. How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt. Wouldn’t that be something!

Along those lines, companies should start giving rewards for contributing to a blocked patent application.

The simultaneous hirings of Steve Alford to UCLA and Andy Enfield to USC has got me interested in the rivalry between the two LA based Pac 12 members for the first time ever.

Talking to a friend before Alford was hired I noted that UCLA's really not a desirable job right now for most coaches. They just fired their coach after he won the conference, they will never be able to return to the heights of 60s and 70s, and I even read somewhere that one anonymous coach felt like USC was a better job these days. Word on the Internet was that Butler's Brad Stevens and VCU's Shaka Smart were not interested and it seemed to me that only a certain kind of well established coach like a John Calipari could possibly be successful there anyway. Alford hadn't occurred to me, but seemed like a reasonable hire until I started reading about some of his troubling history at Iowa, found out he had just signed a 10 year extension with New Mexico, and realized he's had zero tournament success.

On the other hand I knew nothing about Andy Enfield prior to this year's tournament, but I loved the way his FGCU played up tempo offense, and I'm excited to see what he can do with some quality Southern California recruits. I'll bet USC ultrafan and mid major aficionado Brendan Loy was ecstatic about this hiring. Judging by the LA Times letters page many people think USC got the better hire as well. I know who I'm rooting for in the Pac 12 South Division.

Just saw the terrible news about Aaron Swartz this evening and read it with disbelief and anger. While I didn't know him personally, I'm quite familiar with his writings, projects, and interest in digital, social, and political activism after a decade of reading his blog and following him on the internet. He was young, brilliant, and very human and I admired him for all of these things.

A couple more remembrances of note:

• Joey Devilla: Saying Hello and Goodbye to Aaron Swartz
• Cory Doctorow: RIP, Aaron Swartz

Still haven't finished importing the missing posts, but I did upgrade to 3.3.1. Hopefully I can get them imported in the next couple days. I've also noticed some weird issues with axodys.com not loading properly, but that was prior to the WP update. We'll see how things go now.

I'm in the process of finishing up a reimport of the old blog back into a fresh WordPress 3.3 install. Unfortunately something seems to be going awry with the last couple year's worth of posts. Rather than banging my head against the issue further I think the prudent course is to set it aside, get some sleep, and revisit it later today. More later.

I got to bed before midnight last night and ended up getting up before eight this morning feeling pretty well rested. It's kind of nice that I got an early start in that I have plenty of laundry and picking up I can do before Mary comes over.

The weather today is kind of dreary and overcast. The doppler radar doesn't show any precipitation on this side of the state although they are predicting some showers later.

I got in a fair amount of computer gaming this weekend which was pretty fun. I actually finally advanced to the Protoss levels and beat the first couple of those.

We had four of our Macs networked together out at the lake, but we never actually got around to networked StarCraft. We did get in some serious Marathon action though.

Mary made it home safely last night, now we just have to figure out what we're going to do tomorrow.