Rest in Peace: StormQuest

Some of you may know that I spent a fair bit of time in the first half of 2006 writing StormQuest, which was a conversion of Chaosium's excellent Stormbringer RPG into the HeroQuest system. I'd worked through this with the help of Lawrence Whitaker and several of the other top folk at the Tavern Bulletin Board and was really pleased with the result. We playtested at Continuum 2006 in an excellent game run by Graham Spearing and the plan was to publish the conversion (which had grown to over 17,000 words) in the con-book. We also briefly suggested getting a bit more ambitious and publishing it as a Chaosium monograph, or as a supplement for HeroQuest's forthcoming generic 'Questworlds' book.

However, the rumours started after Continuum that Mongoose Publishing had bought the rights to Stormbringer off Chaosium. I'm not privy to the full details of the business deal, but this is the case.

Anyway, we've done some investigation, and now there is no way that StormQuest can be published in the con book, in a proper book, or even as a free PDF to download. I'm pretty down about this as it was the biggest bit of writing I did in 2006.

To quote the end of the original novel by Michael Moorcock, Stormbringer: 

"Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!"

Photo-fest

I finally managed to upload the latest pictures of Nathan to my Flickr account, and some of them are gorgeous, even if I took them myself!

There are also some nice shots from a recent Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) schools event held at the Light in Leeds, which coincided with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) Presidential visit to the Yorkshire Region. This kind of schools stuff is critical to getting kids interested in science and engineering. The pyramid in the picture is made of elastic bands and bamboo dowels, and was built by two schools over a morning.

I'm also pretty pleased with some of the shots I got recently of my mum and dad. My dad had emailed me a shot he'd had taken of him at a recent formal event, which he quite morbidly said would look great on an order of service for a funeral. I disagreed, as I don't think that it captures the essence of him. It was technically good, but wasn't 'my dad'. I'm pleased with the portraits I took as I think they really catch the essence of him.

What's going on, Cupcake?

We have a government that pushes the need to control carbon emissions and goes all preachy on it! They also commit to renewing our nuclear weapons capability. But they don't have the guts to commit to the one big carbon reduction they could make on power generation, committing to new build nuclear power stations.

Renewables are laudable, and should be embraced as heavily as we can, but nuclear is the only low carbon route which can provide the baseload generation.

How come we can have the bomb, but not clean power? Is it me, or is that just crazy?

Updates on the lad...

I'll add some more updates in the near future. I've been a little sucked into 'real life' and cuddles for the lad. I've taken a load more photos and need to get them all sorted out soon.

Revamp

I got really fed up of using my work laptop with an ethernet cable in the back on Thursday, as it means that I have to sit on the sofa with the laptop on my lap. I don't really find this very conducive to working at home (but then again, having a 9 week old in the house is probably far more of a challenge). Anyhow, I'd previously had the home network set up so that I could see the internet with the work Dell, but I couldn't connect to the servers at work via VPN.

I believe (according to a more techy friend) that this is a side effect of the way that I had the network configured so it had a double NAT set up. Now, this was really an accident, so I spent a little time with the network admin utility to fix the problem. Now I can sit at my desk upstairs if I need to do any work from home. OK..... when I need to do some work from home. Beats the sofa any day. Just need to find the desk surface!

I guess it ended up being a lot easier than I expected once I'd worked out exactly how I'd configured the network (and also once I'd saved the configuration file).

Nat-Cam is live and bouncing!

Nathan has two new live and and bouncy exciting toys; a video monitor so he can be seen in glorious black and white when he's in his crib (which he's managing most nights), plus a new exciting bouncer. The bouncer does sounds, lights, and vibrations and he loves it! He loves his gadgets too!

Mummy and Daddy love the video monitor too. Daddy wasn't too fond of it at first, as it wiped out the wireless network, but that was soon solved with a change of channel. It's cool watching Nathan on TV!

He's getting a busy social life too - yesterday he went out with his chums to La Locanda in Collingham. Sadly, he had to drag Mum along too. The day before, he'd been for a weigh-in, and had successfully added another 4 oz on top of the 8 oz the week before.

Nathan does Cute!