Nathan's blog

Well, I have a lot of catching up to do, so let’s dive right in…

We begin in August, mid- to late month. Laura and I went up to Three Creeks Lake to spend a week with Dad and relax. The weather was gorgeous, allowing us to get all of our favorite hikes in: the trail around the lake, out to Little Three Creek Lake, and up to the top of Tam McArthur Rim, and Anne enjoyed them all with us from the comfort of her backpack. She also got her first boat ride while we were up there, although I think we enjoyed it more than she did, and we had a few sleepless nights while she cut her first tooth.

After coming back from the lake, we spent a couple days at home before being joined by my mom and my nephew, Kameron, for the weekend. During their visit, we took Kameron for rides on a ferry, a commuter train, and a bus back home and had a good time enjoying the views each trip afforded.

For Labor Day weekend, I’d been planning to attend the annual Penny Arcade Expo, more commonly known as PAX, which is an enormous game convention in Seattle. I had procrastinated on buying my pass to the show because last year I was able to simply walk in on the first day and get a 3-day badge. I was dismayed to find, after coming home from the lake just days before the show, an announcement on the PAX website that it had sold out. All was not lost, however, as on Saturday, our friends from high school, Ted and Heather, who were in town for PAX, came over with their daughter, Veronica. We had a great time visiting and watching Anne and V play together. Later that evening, I learned that after attendance was monitored on the first day, PAX was permitted to sell another 1,000 tickets each for Saturday and Sunday, allowing me a chance to attend.

I got up ridiculously early that Sunday, somewhere around 4:00 or 4:30 AM, expecting to have to go stand in line for my shot at a badge. Just before I left the house, I decided to have another look at the PAX website to see when registration opened and found I could purchase my ticket online. Registration was scheduled to open at 8:00 AM, and since I figured there would be a line, I headed into Seattle and got to the convention center around 6:00 AM. It turns out that getting there that early was completely unnecessary, as the registration area was deserted. I had coffee at a nearby Starbucks while I waited, and when I went back to registration, I found one guy sitting behind the counter in the empty room. Since I’d bought my ticket online, he was able to give me my badge early. With two to three hours to kill at that point, and being within walking distance of my office, I wandered over there to sit in warmth and relative comfort, and tinker around at my computer until the doors opened at PAX.

Finally, a little after 10:00, I met up with Ted and we headed into the show. This year’s event was, like previous years, the biggest one yet. They had rented the entire Washington State Convention & Trade Center in Seattle, and over the course of the weekend had an estimated 75,000 attendees.We had a great time,  embarrassing ourselves in a Street Fighter 4 tournament, entering a couple raffles, wandering the exhibition hall floor, and playing Left 4 Dead in the PC freeplay area. We both ended up raffle winners, Ted with a solid-state hard drive (SSD) and a laptop cooler, and me with a shiny Antec Mini Skeleton-90 Mini-ITX computer case.

I also saw a lot of great games at the show, but some of my personal favorites were:

• Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii) – A beautiful, hand-drawn and animated 2d fantasy action RPG
• New Super Mario Bros. (Wii) – Like the DS game of the same name, this is a 2d side-scrolling platformer, like the classic Super Mario Bros. games from the original Nintendo Entertainment System and Super NES. Unlike the DS game, this one allows for 4-player simultaneous multiplayer.
• Scribblenauts (DS) – This is a puzzle game with two basic modes: in one, you simply move through the level to reach the goal, and in the other, you’re given a brief, one-sentence description of a goal to accomplish, such as “Reunite the girl and her kitten” or “Protect the food, but don’t upset the hippie by hurting the ants!” What makes this one so interesting is that to complete these tasks, you type in the name(s) of one or more objects and then use them to accomplish your task. The game reportedly understands nearly 23,000 words, allowing for considerable variation and creativity in your solutions. If you have a DS, pick this one up!
• Bioshock 2 (Xbox 360) – Return to the underwater city of Rapture, this time as a Big Daddy prototype with the Big Daddy’s signature giant drill and the ability to splice the genetic mods.

Being at PAX and hanging out with a fellow geek reawakened my inner geek, and I’ve had a ton of fun in the weeks since the show. I built my first new computer in years, intending it to serve as my games machine, home theater PC, first “hackintosh” (I highly recommend this Lifehacker tutorial for the build, and its even easier follow-up, though keep in mind that you should use the hardware they list for best results–mine is similar and works well enough). Once I’ve got it a little more settled, it’ll also be my primary computer. I’ve been having a great time playing Plants vs. Zombies and Left 4 Dead with it. Following this tutorial, I soft-modded my Wii, allowing me to play my games from a USB hard drive and store my game discs in a safe place. With a youngling in the house who will probably be wanting to play games someday, it’ll be nice not having to worry about the discs getting scratched. I also downloaded and briefly experimented with the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK), a software add-on for Canon point-and-shoot cameras that adds a ton of advanced features, like aperture- and shutter-priority exposure modes, a wider range of shutter speeds, time lapse and motion-detection shutter triggers (the latter reportedly being fast enough to capture lightning strikes), and much more. I need a lot more time to take it all in, but I really like what I’ve seen of it so far.

Last weekend, Dad and Donna returned to Seattle from a cruise to Alaska, so we met them at the dock and spent the day wandering around in town. We visited the Olympic Sculpture Park near the waterfront first. I liked many of the pieces on display there, but I sort of wish I hadn’t read most of the accompanying plaques. Perhaps I’m insufficiently cultured or high-minded, but most of the artists’ comments about their pieces sounded like pretentious nonsense to me, and I spent almost as much time chuckling at the plaques as I did viewing the sculptures.

Following the walk along the waterfront, we decided to head over to the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard. It focused on the migration of settlers from the five Nordic countries: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland, and what life was like for those settlers after their arrival in the United States. We spent at least two hours in the museum, and I still came away without seeing everything the museum had to offer. Donna picked up a small book of Norwegian recipes in their gift shop, so for dinner, we made a batch of meatballs (kjøttboller) and ate them over egg noodles. My Norwegian cousin tells me that this wasn’t a very authentically Norwegian meal, (he suggested a lamb dish, which I’m considering making) but it was certainly tasty.

Finally, this week Anne cut her second tooth, another of her bottom incisors. Tomorrow marks a full nine months she’s survived in our care! She’s also gaining proficiency with solid foods: she loves to eat Cheerios, crackers, and a variety of fresh and canned fruits and veggies, has sampled a few meats, and now eats two solid meals daily. She loves books, is becoming quite a speedy crawler, and just loves to play with Rufus’ rubber dog toys, to our amusement and dismay (we don’t want her putting them in her mouth, obviously).

And with that epic update, dear reader, you are once again up to speed on the happenings ’round here. As a side note, I think I will disable the publishing of the Twitter digest posts. I wanted to capture those for me, to have a record of things I’d posted, but I think I also used them as a crutch to avoid writing a real post, knowing that my tweets would end up collected on the front page. If you liked those little updates, the most recent one will still appear on the front page, or you can follow them at twitter.com/nsandver.