Neceros RPG Sheets has several good designs for 4th edition character sheets. There's also an idea I particularly like: powers cards. It's too bad there's not a set of pre-filled ones for various classes, with space to write in your character's specific numbers, but it's still a fine idea.

Ema's Charsheets have some other decent designs, and an intriguing online character manager. I'm not sure how good it is, but as a one-time $5, $10 or $25 signup fee it's cheaper than D&D Insider.


If you've found any good character sheet designs, or another character manager, let me know?

[EDIT: Here's a collection of them. this is a particularly nice automated spreadsheet.]

I've been meaning to post a link to freerice.com for a while now. So there it is.

It's a vocabulary game. It's pretty neat how quickly you can throw together a couple thousand grains doing something that (if you're geeky like um, some people I know) you might otherwise do anyway just to pass the time... while your 3D engine is compiling, for instance.

A few grains of rice here and there really doesn't sound like much, but given that there are people for whom dinner is two spoonfuls of rice every couple of days on a good week... it helps. (Seriously, the price of dirt in Haiti is literally going up because of its demand as a psuedo-food source.)

I pushed it to level 48, just barely...

My first earthquake, and I slept right through it.

There was an aftershock about 2 hours ago that I was wide awake for... and I noticed nothing at all.


I got spam from from my alumni association titled "Tired of those old USF memories?" Why in fact, I am. I commuted 66 miles to USF and didn't make any friends while I was there, and I remember being jerked around quite a lot by the bureaucracy.

New album Diffusion released as a free download at fallsastar.com. Enjoy. :)

(If the website looks messed up you might have to "reload frame" on it -- my web host uses some weird trick with frames and that can confuse style sheet changes under some conditions I haven't pinned down yet.)


My drive home from work earlier was bad due to visibility, but we foolishly decided that the plows had had plenty of time to clear up major roads, and went out to eat.

They hadn't. Local streets had been plowed, but the bridge and much of the rest of I-70, once we got past the last exit where it was worth turning around and giving up, was an unplowed nightmare of ice. Everyone just tried to keep moving in the general direction of "down the road" at whatever crawl could be managed, and some were less than successful. The restaurant we'd picked was closed, but we went to the neighboring Macaroni Grill, which was understaffed. Trader Joe's was open, but Borders was closed and we got stuck leaving its parking lot. Overall it turned into a 3 hour adventure. If we'd had any idea, we'd definitely have stayed in!

On the bright side, Joe's has the Thai shrimp gyoza we'd been missing, and a veggie variety as well. :)

So I'm thinking of joining the 21st century and getting a Nintendo DS. The drive isn't all that strong, because I have plenty to fill my time, but they just seem neat and are within budget.

Any game suggestions?

I'm interested in Electroplankton (if I can find it), Worms: Open Warfare 2, Elite Beat Agents, Jam Sessions. Maybe Picross DS.

And then there's the world of homebrew apps, with some music software and DSMidiWiFi and the like.

And there are GBA games to be had as well, I suppose.

The best little webcomic EVAR

(because it's by Joss Whedon)

issue 2
issue 3

"...we estimate that somewhere around 2020, all the world's content will fit inside an iPod, and all the world's music would sit in your palm as early as 2015..."

So the "web" would basically turn into an update service for something you can carry in your pocket... now that's cool. :)

(I'm assuming that the metaphor about "gas prices" the article mentions actually meant "fuel efficiency" and wasn't utterly brain dead; you don't get to be a vice president of Google if you're stupid.)


And now it's time for my daily geekout. I'm listening to the 30 Days of Night soundtrack, which impressed the snot out of me when we saw the movie in a theater and continues to now. I'd assumed that, as scary-ambient as this soundtrack is, it was done mostly in software. I assumed incorrectly. Here's a gear list from the credits:

Sonor Drum Kit, Zildjian Cymbals/Gongs and Crotales, Boomywang, Hellbells, Englehart Metal Percussion, Surdo, Flexitone, Tympani, Bass Drums, Roto-Toms, Hammond Chord Organ, Moog Taurus Pedals, Monomachine, MicroKorg, Prepared Guitar, Prepared Piano, Bass Rhodes, Harmonium, Clap Trap, Syncussion, Synares, Syndrums, Spring Drums, Circulsonic Death Tube, Cymbal Machine, MS-20, CR-78, ER-1, Machinedrum, Evolver, Waterphone, Found Percussion, PPG Wave 2.2, Omega 8, Melodica, E-mu E4, Ensoniq ESQ-1, SH-101, MG-1, Darkstar, Theremin, Slide Guitar, Acoustic Cello, Electric Cello, Stylophone, Sonica, Marxophone, Guitarette, Upright Bass, Chopsticks, Prepared Carbon Fiber Guitar

I love it! A ton of percussion. Custom built and modified stuff. Wonky old-school toys, craptastic drum machines from the 70's, and eBay junk right alongside "respectable" instruments. The egalitarian (and that's my first use of that word) attitude that no instrument is unworthy, I just find so much more refreshing than the attitude a lot of guys at KVR have.

Working Graveyard Shift May Up Cancer Risk

The implications are pretty serious here for a lot of industries. On the other hand:

Cancer-resistant Mouse Developed By Adding Tumor-suppressor Gene

All we need to do is train mice to run emergency services, transportation, manufacturing, the media, and all the other stuff that has to run at night...

This reminds me that I really need to back up my machine. And that doing so doesn't have to involve two days of figuring out what to back up, and manually zipping them and burning CDs.

I had a dental appointment for today but I had to reschedule it -- major sniffles and sneezing going on.

I suck at Team Fortress 2. I'm that guy who comes in next-to-last place... just above the one who didn't move the entire time. I like Pyro best so far, I think, though it's really situational. No matter what I play, though, there's an Engineers' turret always waiting around the next corner waiting to perforate me. Thankfully there's a series out there for people like me: How To Not Look Like an Idiot in Team Fortress 2.

Portal is tons o' fun. I think I'm almost finished but gave up at about 2:30 last night. shemem is my copilot, and contributed some clever solutions a few times. I'm afraid I distracted her from working on We Poor Shadows. :) While some of the puzzles are pretty straightforward once you learn a repertoire of tricks, some of them really require lateral thinking. I will admit to watching a walkthrough video this morning to figure out the place where I'm stuck -- and now, of course, the solution seems like it should have been obvious.

Once I'm done with Portal, I'll start HL2 episodes 1 and 2. And will keep enjoying TF2 in the meantime, more than I expected I would.

Does anybody out there:

- have a fairly fast internet connection
- not own Half-Life 2
- have a computer capable of running Half-Life 2
- want my extra Half-Life 2 registration? (to download the game via Steam, without the expansions)

(When you install Orange Box, they let you give away extra registrations for any included games you already own. I already have Half-Life 2.)

No Music Day

Might as well declare No Oxygen Day.

Just before learning of this, I had just ordered some CDs through Metropolis. Ha. And I'd already listened to a music discovery podcast, five albums on the Zune, my own work in progress (both in the car and on the Zune).

Tonight I'll probably be showing shemem how to use the H4 so she can record stuff for NaSoAlMo. I may even create more of this terrible plague that threatens humankind, specifically to oppose No Music Day.

(I strongly suspect the whole point of No Music Day is either to make people realize how pervasive music is as almost a kind of environmental pollution, and/or to make people realize how much they appreciate music and really don't want to be without it. Still.)

Well, that's that. With the final track "HEVX," I'm a NaSoAlMo 2007 winner. :)

(Why that title? There's a project under source control at work by that name, and the combination of letters simply caught my eye as nifty. Heavy. X. Something like that.)

Red Moon		4:54
Observer		6:02
Public Emulation		5:28
Taped Down		3:11
Claw Claw Bite		4:58
HEVX		4:43
total		29:16

What now? Make more, of course. Probably this is a good time to revisit "Batcube" and my dubious "Bela Lugosi's Dead" cover. That will probably put me within 3 tracks of a finished real album.

Then I do it again. But first I take a break for holidays and video games. Orange Box and Hellgate are calling.

"Claw Claw Bite," if I don't change the name, is done apart from (hopefully) one last render to deal with some (uncontrolled) howling feedback problems. No lions were harmed in the making of this track, though some lines from a horrible 1941 movie were abused.

As an item of trivia, I've spent about 12 hours on this track in total... more than 9 of which were today. I'm ready to do something else for a while :)

The track inspired by "Fight Noise With Noise" was just inherently wacky, from the tempo to the speech synthesizer to the NES-like melody line... so I finished it with that in mind.

Taped Down (3.65MB, 3:11)

This counts toward NaSoAlMo, but I don't think it will be appearing on the real album. :)

Camping this year wasn't as cold as last year -- no melting our shoes in the fire while shivering -- but still a bit on the cold side. The main problem is getting close enough to keep feet and hands warm, without getting too much in the face.

We saw three turkeys, three deer, and a couple rabbits all on the first day. After that it was mostly spiders, squirrels, attack woodpeckers, and drunk friends. I'm pretty amazed nobody fell into the campfire, really.

Once again, the Daylight Savings switch is making me woozy. Throw in a dental appointment this afternoon, and today is just not a recipe for fun.

To keep up with a linear NaSoAlMo rate I need 4:53 worth of music by the end of the day. So far I have 0:00. I have a start on a track, but it feels empty, like it's maybe worth a couple minutes' filler but not a quality track. It's more difficult to set something aside and say "that doesn't work" when you're on a deadline -- but sometimes getting unstuck is more important than salvaging mediocre work.

The reasons I'm bothering with NaSoAlMo are to crank the creative valves open and to motivate some discipline. "Winning" it is secondary. I may find myself dropping out of it but making myself a different set of rules... we'll see.

For a while now, I've been using private LJ entries to make notes to myself. This was useful because I read my own LJ frequently to check for comments.

Once LJ added the home page thing where you can see recent comments, that changed. I tried leaving myself notes in comments to a private entry, but since the "Date Out of Order" option just plain doesn't work, that turned out to be a hassle.


What I want is a page you can go to that's just a simple text editor that autosaves, and remembers locally that you're logged in. There are a bunch of things that are almost like that.

txtsaver lets you edit and save text files online, but deals with multiple files (which is useful for other reasons) and doesn't remember your login. It also has a small editing box.

jottit is clever -- you can create and publish a wiki page with it pretty much instantly, and assign your own URL on their domain. I'm not terribly fond of wiki editing and it was a few more clicks than would have been ideal, but I almost used that as my solution.

Google Notebook is what I chose. You can easily create a bookmark that opens it in the FireFox sidebar.

This morning it was a little below freezing, and I had a thin layer of ice on my windows. Nice as it was inside the apartment, I wasn't at all prepared for cold. Brrr.


VectorMagic is just about the coolest online graphics tool I've seen. Here's what it did with one of my favorite HJ screenshots:



(The reason the edge of the axe looks funky is it's got gear teeth, not because VectorMagic mangled it.)

It dealt with my little 100x100 FAS logo icon in tiki lounge style:



As with many filters, two of the most fun things you can do with it are:

1. Use it wrong; put a photo in and say it's a logo.
2. Add it to an image as another layer, and blend it in various ways with the non-filtered image.

We saw two vampire movies today: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I hadn't seen since it first came out on video) and 30 Days of Night.

They couldn't be more different. The latter was one of the scariest movies I've ever seen. And I love the soundtrack and will be looking for it later. I stuck around for the full credits not because I expected any post-credits-scenes, but just to listen to the rest of the music.

Apparently the Einstuerzende Neubauten logo was tattooed on one of the characters and I didn't notice, so I was surprised to see it mentioned in the credits. They didn't have anything to do with the soundtrack though. It's kind of a mystery.

Sony BMG's chief anti-piracy lawyer: "Copying" music you own is "stealing"

Everyone else: BMG's chief "anti-piracy" lawyer is a "blithering idiot"


It's amazing just how many times I have to steal songs from myself while I'm working on them.

Fallsastar.com has finally been updated for the "new" album, with excerpts of 12 of the tracks and mp3s of "Ravens" and "Tiger Mountain."

Some day I might put some artist info on the site, when I come up with some. :)