Mac Recipe Management Programs, Planning a Revisit
Sunday, 12 April 2009
Posted by austin in: Personal, Recipes, comments closed
Mostly through a couple of bundles that I’ve purchased recently, I have acquired full licences to Acacia Tree Software’s SousChef and MacGourmet Deluxe (which is, remember, MacGourmet with all of the plug-ins included).
One thing which I mentioned in the last review for MacGourmet is that it failed to import my data from Yum 2.7.4 due to a change in the XML format by the new owners of Yum. This has, as promised, been fixed. I imported my database without problems.
SousChef, I’m happy to report, can now import from MacGourmet databases. It’s not quite the direct import that I’d like, but I have now imported my Yum database into SousChef via MacGourmet.
This leaves Yum 3.0, which I have purchased. These, to me, are the best three recipe management programs in the Mac world. I know some people love YummySoup!, but as I said in my last review, I’ve never been able to warm to YummySoup!, which is too bad because it looks nice otherwise.
I’m going to be living with these recipe programs for a while and do some serious evaluation of all three. This will take a while to do, because we’re preparing to move house at the end of May and we’ve already started packing. Bon Appetit!
What the Obama Inauguration Means to Me
Friday, 9 January 2009
Posted by austin in: Personal, Politics, comments closed
The Presidential Inauguration Committee has been asking for essays about what President-elect Obama’s inauguration means to individuals. Ten people out of however many people submit essays—whether they donate to the inauguration committee or not—will be selected to attend the inauguration. I have submitted the following essay about what this means to me.
In a word, hope.
I do not mean this flippantly, since it was one of the major themes of President-elect Obama’s campaign. Rather, I see this inauguration as an opportunity for America to heal divisions both recent and decades deep. When I was growing up as a child of an Air Force chaplain, I learned what most American schoolchildren learn: that America is the land of equality and opportunity, and that we are a shining beacon of hope and a model for the rest of the world to follow.
By time I finished college in the middle of the Clinton Presidency, I knew that this was as often false as it was true, and I felt it becoming less true as the years wore on with the bitter partisan fighting instead of paying attention to the needs of Americans and the world.
Ten and a half years ago I met my now-wife, who is Canadian. I found it very easy to emigrate: I was disillusioned with America and saw little hope that things would get any better. I could not completely leave America behind—as the place of my birth and where my parents and brother still live, it has a deep grip on my heart. I have watched over the last ten years with deep sadness and anger as my fears of the deep divisions in America were realized. When America quickly fell to partisan bickering and bullying after 9/11, I knew that I needed to be involved in my local political process and soon after took Canadian citizenship.
Yet every two years, I make sure that my voter registration is still valid and request an absentee ballot. I avoid voting on local issues because I am not affected by them, but I try to make sure that I am aware of who is running for national office and figure out the best choice that I can make. I have voted for a hope at healing in America three times in that last three Presidential elections; this election, it seems the rest of America voted with me.
The wounds in the American psyche are deep; there are entrenched interests who would not see them healed, but I have great hope that this Presidency will be the start of the healing process. I grew up with a vision of America as a better place; under President Obama, I have hope that it will begin to be so once again.
According to the rules that they put together, I am eligible for this contest since I am an American citizen, even though I reside in Canada. I hope to win, of course, but it also felt good to write this down. I’m going to leave comments open on this, but will be moderating comments much more heavily than normal. If you don’t have anything nice to say about this in a comment, either don’t say it at all or say it on your own blog.
Mac Recipe Management Programs
Sunday, 23 November 2008
Posted by austin in: Apple, Personal, Recipes, comments closed
Updated 30 November 2008: I sent links of this review to the publishers involved (except for SousChef, because Ben Lachman the developer found this post on his own and reminded me that I hadn’t done this even though I meant to). I received a note from the developer of MacGourmet and have added some additional notes.
It’s time to declutter the house. One of the things I want to get rid of are all the recipe magazines and loose recipes that I have. To do this, I need to keep the recipes that I like or want to try. I need a recipe management program. I currently use Yum 2.7.4, which is good, but not great. I decided to seriously evaluate the various recipe management programs available for the Mac. There’s a number of them out there, each with different strengths. I’m going to be evaluating these programs on the following criteria:
- Browsing: How easy is it to find a recipe without searching?
- Reading: How easy is it to read the recipes, once entered? A “kitchen mode” is nice, but absolutely unnecessary in my kitchen—my iMac is in the office. So, I’ll either be reading the recipe to get a sense of the way to make it (and often just a reminder), or I’ll be printing the recipe.
- Printing: How good does the output look? How much fiddling do I have to do to get multiple recipes on a single page, if they’re small enough? How much fiddling do I have to do to get a longer recipe on a single page? Sure, I can use the n-up feature on my printer, but that shrinks the whole page down really small.
- Searching: How good is the recipe search?
- Adding/Editing: While I will be reading, searching and printing recipes most often, I’m going to be most annoyed at a program while adding a recipe by hand.
- Import: I’ve been using Yum (see below) for a while, and while I’m not unhappy with it, it has some major annoyances on recipe entry that keep me looking. Whatever I switch to is going to have to handle importing my Yum database one way or another, without screwing it up. Additionally, since I’ll be looking at the latest version of Yum, I want to see the external import techniques (from text or the Web).
- Extras: What extras exist for the program? Can I easily transfer a recipe to my iPhone or iPod Touch? Does it have an extensive ingredient list with nutrition data to give a rough approximation of the caloric content? These things aren’t going to be deal breakers, but if everything else works, they could be deal makers.
There are more programs available than I am reviewing here. A number of these programs presented problems early enough in the review process that I didn’t think it was worth spending any more time on them.
One that I wish had been better was Measuring Cup. It has some really interesting ideas including sub-recipes and not distinguishing view and edit modes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have any import facility to speak of, and the controls on the lists are non-standard and finicky. It’s worth looking at if you’re just starting your recipe collection. I’m not.
Connoisseur 1.2
Only Connoisseur 1.2 is available for direct download; there is a beta version referred to, but you must contact the developer for this information.
- Browsing: A Connoisseur has fairly good browsing. It’s laid out much like iTunes with a “sources” list on the left and three filtering criteria on the main panel under the toolbar: Cuisine, Course, and Ingredient. This will make it easy to find recipes based on the ingredients you have at hand and the meal you’re serving.
You can great new “groups” (recipe collections/folders) and smart groups (groups with search criteria) pretty easily. - Reading: C+ After browsing to the recipe, or searching for it, you double click on the recipe in the main list to display it1 in a smaller (but resizable) display window. The window isn’t bad, but it’s too loose: the recipe metadata (such as cook time, yield, etc.) takes up far too much space; blank fields are shown; ingredient lines are 1¼ linespacing, which is too much.
On the up-side, there’s a nice “Cooking View” that fills the screen with the recipe. The directions are too widely spaced, but this is a much better “view” than the default windowed view. As a nice touch, Connoisseur will also read the recipe steps to you. - Printing: F Everything that’s wrong with the display window is wrong with the print function, and it has additional sins of commission. The linespacing per field appears to be about 1½ and the ingredients are still 1¼. The empty fields don’t show here, but the amount of space taken up by the metadata eats up half of the first page. Worse, the metadata is incomplete: it’s cropped if it goes over a certain (small) width. The directions for a “2-Minute Fudge” included with Connoisseur don’t begin until page two—and the heading “Directions” is on page one. The directions are cropped if they’re over a certain (small) width.
- Searching: F ⌘F and ⌘⌥F don’t work for search. As far as I can tell, aside from the filtering mechanisms mentioned in browse, there’s no way to search for a recipe.
- Adding/Editing: F I’m not sure where to begin with the problems presented by Connoisseur’s add/edit recipe sheet. When adding or editing a recipe, you are presented with a modal sheet on the main program window. If you’re copying information from another recipe, you have to first have displayed that recipe in a separate window before you start editing the current one. The recipe sheet is tabbed and has far too many controls on it (at the bottom of the sheet is a help question mark, previous, next, a “cooked” checkbox, cancel, and save. The recipe scaling feature looks impressive, but I’m not sure why it’s part of the recipe editing—this is something that Connoisseur should be able to figure out automatically, on the fly.
The ingredients and directions are on separate tabs, requiring flipping tabs to make sure you’re correctly using all of the ingredients as you’re writing the recipe down (as someone who creates recipes from time to time, this matters). Ingredient and direction entry is more complex than it should be, relying on +/- buttons on each and every ingredient and step. - Import: B Will not import directly from the Yum database format, but recognized the Yum XML format reasonably well. The import itself was fairly pedestrian, although my imported recipes had stupid errors, such as: “2. 1. In a small bowl…” There’s some level of intelligence that should be applied here. There’s no import from a webpage, and the import from text is a little hit-and-miss (in my test of a copied recipe from the New York Times, the instructions were inserted as ingredients, possibly because they were numbered).
- Extras: There’s a nice set of default recipes included. You can add a recipe to a shopping list and export it to an iPod as a list, or to the Palm program “HandyShopper” and “SplashShopper” (which would be useful if I used a Palm device anymore). There’s an online component for shared recipes and you can download others’ shared recipes, too. It looks like there’s a moderation process to the recipes, though.
This is not a program that I would recommend to anyone at this point. It looks pretty, and the filtering mechanism is superb, but I don’t think that this is a usable program.
Cookware Deluxe 3.2
- Browsing: B- Cookware Deluxe starts in a recipe view, requiring explicit switching to a browser. The browse interface is a filtering interface that’s rather busy and confusing. The display has three panels. The recipes are in the main panel on the right, and there is a switch (”First/Any”, defaulting to “First”), followed by the alphabet, “All”, and a heart symbol. Clicking on a letter will filter the display of recipes based on the presence of that letter at the beginning of a word in the recipe name; if the switch is set to “first”, only the first word is considered. Clicking on “All” clears the filters and clicking on the heart selects “collected” recipes (those that carry from version to version).
The upper panel on the left has five tabs that act as filters: Cookbook, Ingredient, Region, Course, Bev (the alcoholic beverage one would have with the recipe, generally limited to wines and some beers). These filters are not co-operative filters; they work independently (one cannot select an ingredient of “Asparagus” and a beverage of “Pinot Grigio” to filter for recipes that call for both). The lower panel are for saved search templates (loading a saved search goes to the Find window) and menu sets (collecting several recipes that are intended to go together as a meal). Clicking on “All” above the menu list removes any of the filters applied from the left panel, too.
Cookware Deluxe also has a planner view where meals and menus can be planned in advance. There’s both a monthly calendar and a weekly calendar view (called “Planner” and “Details”, confusingly). There is no option to make Monday the beginning of the week. - Reading: The recipe display panel is fairly decent, divided into two panels (a large upper panel shaped like a recipe card and a lower tabbed panel). The recipe card is divided into three columns. The first column is a quarter of the entire card and contains the name of the recipe, a tabbed box for photographs of the recipe, and other important metadata (cooking time, oven pre-heat temperature, difficulty).
The second column is the ingredient column and also takes up a quarter of the recipe card. The third column has a small toolbar (about ¹/₁₀ of the vertical space), a description area (about ²/₁₀ of the vertical space), and the directions. The toolbar over the directions provide a checkbox (”Multi-Print”), four buttons (Tools, Custom Print Layout, User Prefs, and Large Print Display), another checkbox (”Collected Recipe”, see above), and a bronze badge with a check mark inside for checking spelling.
The font in all of these sections is small, but there are two icons of interest for this: in the lower left hand of the card is an icon that looks like a two item bar graph. Clicking on the taller bar zooms the interface larger; the shorter bar zooms it smaller (and it will go smaller than the default). In the toolbar over the directions column the last button will display the current recipe in a window with a much larger font for viewing from a distance. It’s not as good as Connoisseur’s full screen display, but it works (it also only shows the ingredients and directions.
The bottom tabbed panel allows for category information (cookbooks, course, main ingredient, region, beverage, source, recipes it requires, and recipes that work well with it); additional source information, Weight Watchers™ points, and nutritional data (unformatted and not calculated on purpose); and notes and substitutions. - Printing: A- Very strong. Includes the ability to customize where each section of a recipe, although the sections themselves include very weak formatting. The “Multi-print” selection (in recipes and the browse list) allows you to print multiple recipes on a single page (if they fit).
- Searching: Has relatively strong search capabilities, but the layout is pretty confusing.
- Adding/Editing: B- Recipes can only be created from the “Recipe” view; not from the “Browser” view. The strengths of the recipe view are present, but each of the fields is unformatted, leaving it to the user to know the appropriate abbreviations and names of each ingredient. This makes for easy cut and paste, but explains why the “main ingredient” must be entered separately; the ingredients are not stored individually, but in aggregate. Note that I did not attempt drag and drop adding, but I would expect it to work well given the lack of formatting in the fields.
- Import: C- Only supports importing past CookWare recipes, recipe sets, and MasterCook recipes. This is found under the application menu, not a “File” menu.
- Extras: Supports an iPod cookbook or recipe (presumably just a text note). Supports QuickTime movies for each recipe. Has a Windows version.
This is another program that I can’t recommend. There are some nice features, but this program is written on top of FileMaker and it feels like it. The layout is crowded and hard to read; if there’s been thought given to making this program easier to use, it seems to have been hampered by FileMaker forms options.
MacGourmet 2.3
MacGourmet and MacGourmet Deluxe are essentially the same program. MacGourmet Deluxe includes all of the available MacGourmet plug-ins (”Cookbook”, “Mealplan”, and “Nutrition”) and is a better value than buying the plug-ins individually. Because the plug-ins are extra for MacGourmet, I will only cover them in the Extras section of the review.
- Browsing: B+ The interface for MacGourmet looks like the Apple Mail or NetNewsWire interface with sources and folders on the left, a recipe index on the top right and recipe details on the bottom right. There are two views for the recipe index: a standard tabular view and a simplified image, name, source, and rating view. By default, the simplified view only shows two recipes at a time; the standard view shows seven.
- Reading: A The recipe layout is beautiful. The ingredients are in a formatted box with the source, yield, pictures, and other metadata on the right side of the recipe2. The directions are below the ingredients. There’s a very readable chef view; as a nice touch, if multiple recipes are selected, the chef view is a tabbed interface, one tab per recipe. In the standard view, only one recipe can be displayed at a time; multiple recipes can be displayed in separate chef view windows as well.
- Printing: A Standard printing facilities are superb and support printing on Avery 3×5 and 4×6 cards as well as several other templates.
- Searching: A Simple but effective rule-based “cupboard” searching (like Spotlight) with ⌘F. ⌘⌥F provides access to the quick search box, which is very effective. Explicit note, recipe, and wine note searches are also available.
- Adding/Editing: B- Some of the problems seen in Connoisseur’s add/edit screen are here to a lesser degree. By default the recipe add/edit screen isn’t a modal sheet (but it can be configured as such), but it is a modal dialog that blocks the main view. Otherwise, it takes an iTunes approach to editing: multiple tabs for Info, Ingredients, Directions, Preparation, Notes, Picture, and Nutrition data (which can be calculated from the ingredient list). The ingredients list is pretty easy to use, but there are two columns of checkboxes (”D” and “M”) which aren’t explained in the help documents. “D” marks the ingredient line as a descriptive title separating distinct portions of the ingredient list; I haven’t figured out what “M” does. The other sections are unformatted text entry.
- Import: A Importing is strengthened by the clippings section to turn clipboard results into recipes relatively quickly. Featured recipes from MacGourmet.com and Amazon.com are also automatically importable through the “Featured” section. It supports importing from Yum, but only imported 70 of the 116 recipes that I have in Yum; I’m not sure if this is a demo limitation or not.
- Extras: There’s a shopping list, a generic note list, and wine notes. Easily supports publishing to standalone sites or weblogs (the ability to use a weblog publisher like MarsEdit would be nice).
The Cookbook Builder plug-in is a fairly nice idea and works reasonably well (drag and drop recipes into the appropriate places), although I don’t think it’s something that I would use often, if at all. The meal planner works similarly but is a little finicky as to where things should be dragged (if I drag the “breakfast” meal into the day area, even if it’s not on the day row, the “breakfast” meal should land in the right spot; don’t make me care about your hierarchies when adding—you just need to do the right thing). It’s nice that the meal planner can easily become a shopping list. The nutritional plug-in is a little confusing as to how it works at first (you need to edit the recipe to calculate the nutritional value for it based on ingredients), but it does a very nice job of calculating once it’s clear. - Update: Michael Dupuis, the developer of MacGourmet, indicated that the Yum import failure with MacGourmet is related to an XML format change in the Yum format, not a limitation in the demo. This will be fixed in the next update of MacGourmet. I discovered that I had forgotten to put a grade on the Import feature. He also mentioned that the “D” and “M” checkboxes in recipes are explained on pages 23–24 of the user guide as “Divider” (descriptive title, as I surmised) and “Main Ingredient”. Finally, the post editor allows you to choose an extern blog posting tool such as MarsEdit by choosing it under the “Post using” menu.
This is a great program. There’s enough here that I can possibly see replacing Yum with MacGourmet. I suspect that although I don’t see myself using the cookbook builder, I would consider using the meal planner and the nutrition calculator, so I might go with MacGourmet Deluxe.
SousChef 1.0.1
- Browsing: A- The app is divided into three panels: a source list, a recipe list, and a recipe display. It looks very much like the Address Book application provided with Mac OS X. The source list contains a master recipe library, a search results entry, recent imports, and then user-added folders and collections. Folders can only contain collections; collections contain recipes. Collections are associative; recipes can belong to more than one collection at a time. Deleting a recipe from a collection only deletes it from the collection; it does not appear that there is a way to delete a recipe from the recipe library permanently except using the recipe library view.
- Reading: A The reading pane is clear, well laid out, and easy to read. This is not as flexible as the display in MacGourmet, but I am pleased to say that it’s easily readable. The full-screen “Cook” view is the best I’ve seen in any of these programs: it will not only speak your recipe (which Connoisseur also does), but you can also turn on voice recognition so that you can tell it you want the next instruction to be read. Drop down menus in the ingredients list let you search for other recipes with this ingredient with ease.
- Printing: B- The print layout is functional and well laid out, but you can’t print more than one recipe at a time.
- Searching: A+ Excellent search on ingredients, name, category, or cuisine. Simultaneously searches local and “cloud” recipes.
- Adding/Editing: A- Heavy reminders of Address Book here; ingredients and directions are added and removed with the red “-” and green “+” circles. Can’t drag and drop ingredients, and the green “+” isn’t always visible on entry. Sub-recipes (the crust for a cheesecake) are handled manually (possibly poorly). Directions are automatically numbered. Notes are automatically bulleted.
- Import: B Can only import one recipe at a time essentially from the clipboard or a single text file. Does not handle heavily formatted recipes well. No support for Yum importing.
- Extras: Blogging, although how it works is not clear without a licence. “Cloud” recipe sharing of recipes in yours and others cookbooks.
This is another program that I really like. I’m not happy about the state of import for multiple recipes—I have an extensive collection that I want to import already. Conversion utilities would be very useful here. I’d also like to see print improved some, or at least some sort of iPhone integration.
Yum 3.0
Yum was recently acquired by “Dare to be Creative” and has been turned into a shareware program as of Yum 3.0. I’m currently using Yum 2.7.4 which is no longer supported. I’m reasonably happy with Yum 2.7.4. This review is based on the trial version of Yum 3.0.
- Browsing: A- Like several other recipe programs, Yum uses a 3 column layout. In this case, it’s category, recipe list, and then the recipe itself. Categories are associative (and in Yum 2.7.4, able to be managed in the “categories drawer”; this appears to be read-only in Yum 3). A nice touch carried over from Yum 2.7 is that when you select a recipe, all of the categories to which it belongs are highlighted (similar to Address Book).
- Reading: A- Simple, well-laid out. Ingredients are always on the left; the method (directions) are always on the right. There’s a full-screen mode, but the default configuration misses the point (it doesn’t increase the font size at all)—you need to go into the Format|Manage Layouts and change the “step-by-step” layout to “Step-by-Step” to be meaningful.
- Printing: A- Layouts can be edited (it’s not completely clear how they work) and multiple recipes can be printed on a single page if they fit. Layout is completely customizable (but I have never done so).
- Searching: B+ It works well enough, but there’s no keyboard shortcut.
- Adding/Editing: B+ Fairly good adding and editing. It’s been improved from 2.7 (which allowed the method to be formatted rich text). Automatically converts fractions to their proper display form. Has a “paste ingredients” for quick addition from a copied list. Scaling is done in here and not elsewhere.
- Import: Imports from Yum, MasterCook, and XML only. Doesn’t have a single recipe import mode (although “paste ingredients” helps with that).
- Extras: Now comes with a shopping list mode.
This is a fair update to a good recipe manager. I’m not sure that it’s worth the shareware cost, when others that offer more features are just a few dollars more. However, I am excited to see that Yum has been acquired and is under active development again; I would not be surprised to see Yum become a viable competitor to YummySoup!, MacGourmet, and SousChef moving forward.
YummySoup! 1.6.9.5
I’ve tried YummySoup! a few times and never been quite convinced by it.
- Browsing: A Like MacGourmet, this is somewhat reminiscent of Mail or NetNewsWire; there’s a source list on the left and recipes on the right. There’s both the “My Library” and the “Online Library” view for viewing and sharing recipes online. The default recipe index (top right panel) is the image browser. This isn’t quite Recipe CoverFlow, but it’s pretty damned close. This view alone argues in favour of taking pictures of your masterpieces. There’s also a standard tabular view which is clear and readable. There are both groups (folders) and smart groups (live search folders); groups are associative (recipes can exist in more than one group at a time). Recipes can be removed from a group or from the library.
- Reading: B+ Functional and pleasant, but it still puts metadata at the top and too prominent. The first thing I care about when looking at a recipe is the ingredients. I don’t care about the source, difficulty, ethnicity or anything else. The full screen view is well done, but not as nice as SousChef (and, to be honest, I don’t care about the recipe picture in full screen mode).
- Printing: C+ Only one recipe can be printed at a time. Standard print format.
- Searching: B No keyboard shortcut. It works well from the search box, and the smart groups really are smart.
- Adding/Editing: A- A modal sheet for editing, but everything is on one pane (no tabs!). Easily make new ingredient groups; good auto-fill values. Bullet (●), ℃ and ℉ buttons. It gets nearly everything right (modal?).
- Import: B+ Doesn’t support importing from Yum; I could import Connoisseur or MacGourmet recipes if I wanted to. Importing from a web site could not be easier (and works very similarly to SousChef; YummySoup! had it first, though).
- Extras: An easy to use grocery list; a liquor cabinet tracker. Online publishing (via email to HungrySeacow) and downloading.
I’m still undecided about what to think about YummySoup!. I like what it has, but it has some weaknesses that I’m not fond of. I don’t think that it’s as good as MacGourmet or SousChef.
The Verdict
Tonight, the verdict is to change nothing—I’m not convinced that the alternatives are worth the price today (including the new Yum 3.0), and the stronger contenders (MacGourmet, SousChef, YummySoup!, Yum 3.0) have serious flaws with how I need to use a recipe management program. If I were forced to make a choice, I think that MacGourmet Deluxe would be the winner, but I’m not sure that the expense is worth the time and effort it would take me to switch. I really want to like SousChef, but it’s not quite there yet for me.
Notes
Common Craft Explains Twitter
Wednesday, 5 March 2008
Posted by austin in: Personal, Technology, Twitter, comments closed
I love this explanation of Twitter from Comon Craft.
(Via Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting.)
A Legend Passes
Tuesday, 4 March 2008
Posted by austin in: Personal, comments closed
So, as most of the gaming world knows, E. Gary Gygax died today.
This begins John C. Welch’s paean to the more famous of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons. I haven’t read a lot of them, but I really liked John’s and really think it’s worth reading. Wil Wheaton also has some really cool things to say.
Like many other geeks, I grew up playing D&D. I don’t remember exactly when I first played, but I know that like Wil, it helped me survive with a few of the other geeks at First Baptist Church School in Charleston, South Carolina. It gave me a ready-made group of friends when we moved to San Antonio, Texas and I was starting at Judson High School. I remember long hours of play with Travis, Randy, and Von. We explored not only D&D, but various other games including Star Frontiers.
D&D was one of the things that helped me survive at Boston University where I knew no one (the other was an early exposure to the Internet of 1989, where IRC channels were numbered, and I played my first MUD—largely based on a mix of D&D and Adventure). Without D&D, there would be no World of Warcraft.
My favourite module to run as a DM has always been Ravenloft. At Boston University, I played with a group of Monty Haulers (one of them had three Wands of Wonder, fully charged, ok?) and they were quite cocky. They hadn’t met someone who could match them in using the rules. I boosted Strahd—a vampire as nasty as they come, and the main villain of the module—to their power. He was powerful enough to cast Anti-Magic Shell. This spell, for those of you not familiar with D&D, nullifies all magic in a radius of 14 feet for 60 minutes and vampires can only be damaged by silver or magic weapons of a certain strength (+2, I think). What was left unsaid in the rules, and I made a call on, was that vampires weren’t powered by magic.
Strahd attacked them early on and devastated them by casting Anti-Magic Shell, leaving them with no way to damage him. How did they drive him off? Through an innovative use of their combined magical items. The wizard cast Tensor’s Floating Disk and then used a Ring of Telekinesis to invert it. They poured five or six bottles of holy water into the inverted disk and then used telekinesis to float the disk over Strahd’s head. They dispelled the disk and dumped the holy water on his head.
I ran Ravenloft twice more with different groups, and always had a lot of fun. I played more than D&D, getting into Cyberpunk and various super hero games (I always thought Villains and Vigilantes was the best), and kept playing until just over ten years ago. But it was an important part of my life, and something that I won’t forget. And, as John said:
Goodbye Gary, and thanks. My life wouldn’t have been the same without you.
More Old Magazines
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
Posted by austin in: Personal, Toronto, comments closed
So, I went back to the medical devices place to return the trial mask and buy the permanent mask. I had to wait a while, so I dug through all of their magazines. At first, it seemed that the September 1989 magazine I found was the oldest:
A couple of minutes more digging yielded an older magazine, though, by five months.
But I kept looking. Long before my appointment was ready, I found something twenty-four years old:
But right under that one was one that was even older: Woman’s Day from February 1982. Twenty-five years old, almost twenty-six.
Own Your Words
Thursday, 8 November 2007
Posted by austin in: HaloStatue, Personal, comments closed
I have approved my last anonymous comment on halostatue.ca. I don’t care if people disagree with me; I do care that people won’t own their words. I happily own my words here—whether you agree with me or not. I expect people who comment on my posts to do the same.
I don’t have a problem with identifiable pseudonyms, like Fake Steve Jobs or Mini-Microsoft or even why the lucky stiff. Those are all people who can be identified. I do have a problem with anonymous cowards, as Slashdot calls them.
If you want to comment on my blog in the future, you must provide either a valid email address that I can verify personally (and I will) or a valid URL to your own blog or public profile page that identifies you in a way that people can see what you’re about—whether you’re a real person or a pseudonymous person. If you don’t do one of the above, your comment will be deleted with no notice.
I also won’t allow abusive comments, toward me or toward others. If you feel that I have been abusive in a post, please post a comment. I will act on it. (See the discussion in last year’s posts with Ola Bini; we worked out our differences.)
My readers, whomever they may be, will be able to know that even if I accept a pseudonym, I have at least been able to find someone who will own up to the words posted here.
Comments on this post are closed.
Amnesty Condemns Canada on Death Penalty
Wednesday, 7 November 2007
Posted by austin in: Personal, Politics, comments closed
So, Amnesty International is condemning Canada for being soft on the death penalty. I mostly agree with them. The problem isn’t Canada the nation, it’s the conservative government. Canadians are still largely against the death penalty, and support the idea that we should not extradite criminals if they are to face the death penalty, and support the idea that we should request clemency for Canadian citizens facing the death penalty in other nations.
The ConservativesReform Party, on the other hand, are a bunch of rednecks who would love to see it brought back. So, they come up with excuses as to why they’re backpedaling on forty years of precedent. They sound as lame as the Republicans do south of us.
It’s really too bad that Dion’s Liberals are too lily-livered to come up with real positions that the ConservativesReform Party can’t respond to without sounding like the rednecks they are. Or that real Progressive Conservatives can’t stand up and take their party back from Stephen Harper’s rednecks.
Medical Office Magazine Collections
Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Posted by austin in: Personal, comments closed
So, I went to get a CPAP device yesterday. While waiting in the lobby of the medical devices office in Mississauga, I flipped through their magazine stack. This is what I found:
This is obviously old. The cut of the model’s blouse is not recent—I’m one of the least fashion-observant people in existence, but even I can recognise this. More obvious is the model’s hair style. Yeah, there’s a few people who have similar hair styles in 2007, but it’s very uncommon, and never on magazine covers at this point. So, when was this thing published?
Eighteen years ago.
I expect to find old magazines in a medical office. It’s a common thing these days, right? But eighteen years? Isn’t there a statute of limitations for keeping around old magazines?
Edgar Bronfman, Jr. is an idiot…
Tuesday, 2 October 2007
Posted by austin in: Personal, comments closed
“Never before in the history of content has the hardware been more valuable than the software…You think about the VCR or the video cassette—the video cassette always had more value than the VCR that you shoved it into. Apple has been able to turn that model on its head.”
Edgar Bronfman, Jr. (Chairman, Warner Music Group), in Like Amazon’s DRM-Free Music Downloads? Thank Apple
Edgar Bronfman is an idiot who simply doesn’t get it. Apple hasn’t made the hardware more valuable, it’s made the collection more valuable. It used to be that you weren’t able to carry the majority of your media collection with you; now, that collection represents a valuable investment. Not the hardware.
Moron.
