Today I strapped a kayack on a car (badly) and gingerly drove it out to the country, stopping for Greek food enroute. Now at my yurt, where I hung out and played Agricola all afternoon with my sister. Working on some processing of the 19 applicants for DebConfNewbies sponsorship while amazing venison potstickers are started. Tomorrow morning three kayackers will go out early and float down the river, and maybe find where the underriver creek emerges. Good times!

Backing up a bit, the past two months have been significant ones. First, I quit my job. Then I almost bought a lot of land, which would have been huge, especially without an income. But it fell through just before closing, and I've had to push the idea of getting some land in the country back off into the indefinite future, where it probably belongs. Instead, Anna and Mark have been amazing, letting me come out here very regularly to unwind. And I've been very wound up, since there's a secret project under development that I can't discuss yet.

Hmm, maybe not being on Facebook anymore will mean more personal blogging. That would be good. Now to go help with the potstickers..

 Here we have a robot  
 with a very pointy face.  
 His name is Kaxxt,  
 he lives in outer space.  

            -- Why The Lucky Stiff

Kaxxt is _why's concept of a card game to subtly introduce kids to some basics of programming, including branching, recursion and stack overflows. He introduced the concept at the end of his talk at the ART && CODE Symposium.

I've adapted Kaxxt so it can be played using the Icehouse game pieces. They're a good fit, since Kaxxt is about lasers, and involves manipulating tokens to direct the lasers.

Kaxxt on Ice is now open for playtesting.

More...

This should solve the yurt's bed problem. Over the past two years I've learned there are really two: It's not a fully dry environment so anything left on the floor will mildew; and the yurt makes no pretense of having a level floor. Thus this custom bed with independently levelable legs, custom sized to hold together a multipart matress. In keeping with the yurt thing, it's disassemblable and portable, but not too easily. :)

Couldn't have been done without Mark's skilled ripping of the plywood. Anna cut the smaller boards and assisted, and we were very happy with what we managed to accomplish in a few hours. It's sturdy, and even level.