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!

At sixes and sevens...

Struggling with reading at the moment due to a number of things - misplaced books, and time being the main ones. I'm juggling between a CJ Cherryh collection...

...which I managed to lose for a fortnight by leaving it in a bag... Secrets of San Francisco...

...an RPG supplement for Call of Cthulhu.... and two others – The Collected Ghost Stories of MR James, and Eragon....

...which is a book I've had for far too long. The James is excellent, and I'm really looking forward to reading it, especially as I ordered it at Christmas. I'm more nervous about Eragon, because it's been so hyped, and I'm hoping that it isn't going to be as disappointing as Harry Potter was. The Cherryh novel is actually two of her earlier books, and both of them focus on people lost from their own culture. Reading the first one has reminded me just how well she does that style of novel, and the way her stories are always so character driven (unlike a lot of SF).

(No picture here for the MR James as there's none on Amazon).

A Busy Week.

It's been an interesting and busy week, which explains the time since the last post here. I've been travelling with work a fair bit to do some customer audits related to a company we are thinking of taking on in a service role, and Jill has had the usual clinic sessions combined with a check up to see how she is (rather than the baby).

Monday saw an early start across the Pennines to Macclesfield to a pharma company. It was very interesting to see, especially the difference of focus that massive margins mean. My company makes FMCGs and is far more conscious of the cost of waste and efficiencies than the pharma company we visited. It was a totally different culture, but it was also nice to see a British based business that is still doing well.

Wednesday I was on a big trip down South, so I worked from home in the morning. It gave me a far better appreciation of the pressures on Jill during the day, as writing a report played second fiddle to changing nappies, feeding and generally stopping tears. The value of the new baby bouncer was shown, as it was a sure way to thirty minutes quiet (and an excited Nathan!). Typing one handed, I managed to complete the report before I left. For reference, the bouncer is a Fisher Price one with lights, sounds, music and good vibrations! It was certainly giving Nathan good vibrations!

The hire car for the trip was a VW Passat, which was great once I worked out (a) how to start it and (b) where the handbrake was. The wonders of electronic gizmos making every car different. It was a completely different kettle of fish to the Renault Megane I'd had on Monday, and a pleasure to drive, certainly on a par with our Toyota Avensis.

The trip to Oxford was pretty clear, and I arrived at the 'hotel' that I was staying at earlier than I planned, 3 miles from the customer we were to visit. I use the term hotel loosely, as it was a 'Day's Inn' at a service station - clean, basic but with decent wireless internet access. I met up with the rest of the audit team (from another site) in the 'restaurant' and we enjoyed the best fare that Welcome Break could provide. It was all going swimmingly until I went to bed and phoned Jill, when I found out that work was after me.

I called the security office and they told me that a fire alarm incident had happened, and the long and the short of it was that I ended up turning the car around and coming back to support the follow up. I checked out with the bemused receptionist at ten to midnight, then headed back up the M40/A43/M1/M18/A1M... to work. I finally got home to my bed at 7AM the next morning, tired and shattered. I was pretty relieved too, as I think Jill was about to murder me when I came into the house at 6.30AM. She hadn't expected me and I think that I was going to face a fencing foil or something!

Jill has had a hard week – Nathan is in the middle of a growth spurt and as a result very demanding. It's wearing her down, and it's very difficult for me to do a lot practically beyond do the best I can to help look after him in the evening. The GREAT news is the fact that he has put on 8 oz (old money!) over the last week and is finally above his birth weight. This has been a great relief to both of us, and also explains his constant demands for food the last few days. Put in a context like that, it's fantastic. Friday night helped; I ended up as Nathan's chair for the evening while Jill pottered around. It's a good thing that Five US had three episodes of CSI back to back!

This morning saw me in work (playing catch up), but we spent most of the afternoon out in town, pushing the pram down and finding out just how much stuff you can get in a pram with a baby! I start to understand my mum's tales of carrying the collapsed family pet dog in the pram as well as me and the shopping. The Mothercare plastic bag clips are wonderful things! As I type this, Nathan is fast asleep recovering from his exertions (being pushed around town). We've got some good new pictures, but it'll be tomorrow before I post them to Flickr. It's nice having a quiet weekend. I'm glad I didn't have to go to South Africa with work this weekend as was originally planned!