John Fiala's Website

So, last night here in Denver was the original ie6Funeral party, and I showed up. There was a lot of booze, a lot of really tasty snacks - Forest Room 5 did a fine job there - and finally, there were remembrances. And here's the one I came up with:

Now, there's a bunch of others that my friend Matthew Saunders posted on his blog, so if you want to see more about the funeral, and see a picture of the deceased, I suggest heading there. It was a lot of fun.

Here's the list of the 50 best core rules, as scored on RPG.net, bold the ones you own. (Picked up from chadu's livejournal.)

1 Nobilis (8.31)
2 Spirit of the Century (8.25)
3 King Arthur Pendragon (8.14)
4 Unknown Armies (8.13)
5 Call of Cthulhu (7.95)
6 Feng Shui: Action Movie Roleplaying (7.93)
7 Mutants & Masterminds (7.75)
8 Over the Edge (7.7)
9 Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (7.68)
10 Paranoia (7.68)

A mixture of short items I thought I should mention.

• My friends and I have started up a coop of developers and web designers, called Vintage Digital, and now we've got a website and you can see a picture of me from when I was visiting Boston for Drupalcon there. I also posted a huge blog post going over how to update Ubercart so it can handle multi-currency. If you're interested, have a look.

This year it was Tammy's turn to choose, so we are down in New Bern North Carolina to visit her family. We left on Christmas Eve, which meant that we actually unwrapped gifts from each other (and from my family) on the 23rd, which was a little odd. She really loved the Falling Water Lego set I got her, and the foot tall Nene Thomas Fairy doll that I found. I got some neat books, some video games, and a 32 gig flash drive that I sorely needed.

The actual travel was a bit miserable. I wasn't feeling very well that day, and was half-asleep through the entire flight, except for when I made the mistake of trying to move my legs during the flights. I'm not very fond of the legroom they give you these days. We finally flew into Raleigh airport (which looked very nice) and had our two hour drive down to New Bern. (Usually we try to fly into New Bern's airport, but unfortunately all the flights were full when we went for tickets.)

Sadly, no Avatar for me today. I totally underestimated the demand to see the film on 11:50 on a Sunday, and so when we finally arrived, shows were sold out until 11pm! So, Tammy and I will have to wait until we get back from North Carolina to sit and watch it. (Tammy's family lives in a nice place, but I'm willing to bet money there isn't IMAX any closer than Raleigh.)

The Continental Deli/Sausage in Cherry Creek North is a great little place to eat lunch at, or to go shopping for old world food and snacks. Andy turned me onto the place, and we went there today for lunch. I got a bratwurst (with apple and beer in it) along with sauerkraut and potato salad, and he got Gulash on some sort of noodles. Both were really good - although I couldn't finish my sauerkraut.

While there we saw some large chocolate ladybugs. Not chocolate-covered ladybugs, but chocolate like you see chocolate Santas - molded out of chocolate with foil wrapped around. According to the deli lady, in Germany they're considered good luck, so they make treats out of them. She also mentioned that Germans like pigs for good luck, and as it turns out when we got to the register there was a bucket of marzipan pig heads for sale.

So, my copy of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition arrived today, and it's huge! A bock packed with all sorts of things, and I haven't had time to really look at it yet.

But Jingoro has figured out what to do with it...

Haven't blogged in a while - keep meaning to do deep meaningful posts, and then forget to actually do them. Sigh.

Feeling pretty sick right now - got some kind of headache and crud and cold feet thing. Not sure what it is, but I'm already really tired of it.

Firehouse.com, the last major project I worked on with pingVision, has now been officially launched! I worked as lead developer on this project with the able assistance of Matthew Saunders & Elizabeth Hause on the web producing side; and Ben Jeavons, Matt Tucker, Al Stephen, Kevin Bridges and Zach Meyer on the development and theming side.

Firehouse is a large site which includes articles of fires and fire-handling topics, pages for each fire station who wants to be hosted there, photographs of stations and fire equipment submitted by users, editorial cartoons on the firefighting life, Webinars, an online store for buying subscriptions to the magazine, and even A digital copy of their magazine, month by month, and probably some other stuff I'm not even remembering. Oh, and some blogging, too.

I'll probably work up more of a 'this is how we done it' post later, right now I'm basking in the glow of success.

So, this is Denver: Three days ago I stayed home from work because of a blizzard dropping a foot or two of snow on the city. Today I have the doors open to air out the house, and am happily doing a little work outside. The snow is happily melting away, and will be gone by mid-week, except for those mountains of snow created by the supermarkets pushing all of the snow in their parking lots into one pile of dirty snow, which will last for weeks.

The new bookshelves are great, but it was a bit of a job carving up the boxes they came into into small enough pieces for recycling... but I've managed to do that. This being the weekend after MileHiCon, there's a bunch of minor household chores that didn't get done last weekend and still need to get done now. Tammy's off having fun with a friend, and later on I get to show off the registration system I knocked together for Magnacon. Yay me!