A bit of this and a bit of that

Technical problems stop the Panzers in their tracks

Just don't aim for
the window...

Badger came round last night for what was supposed to be another session of Fighting Formations and perhaps some Combat Commander. Unfortunately events were to intervene in the form of the shiny new desktop PC which I had taken delivery of just the previous day. I hadn't had time to set everything up that Thursday, so on the Friday I decided just to wait for Badger's arrival so that he could offer his assistance. It's not that I'm a complete tech-idiot or anything but there are always risks associated with transferring your old system to a new machine, so I felt it would be useful to have Badger on hand.

Just as well too it turned out.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

A 21st century nightmare

It all began when I foolishly simply yanked the USB connector for my external hard drive from its socket in the back of my old machine. When I had the new computer all set up, it kept telling me that I had to format the external hard drive, on which is stored all the work I've done in more than 10 years. You can imagine then, dear readers, how I was feeling at that point. Badger leapt into the breach and, a quick internet search later, he had diagnosed the problem: namely that I had forgotten to 'safely remove' the external hard drive. Apparently it's rare that this will produce problems which, to be blunt, was little comfort for me at that moment.

The Badger saves the day

Simple Green

So, Badger was humming and hawing about how to fix the problem and reassuring me that he was sure my data could be recovered somehow or other, when he suddenly remembered that I have an old laptop on which, some time ago, he'd installed Linux Mint in the hope that he could encourage me finally to abandon Windows (he's something of a Linux crusader don't you know). That effort had failed because, for some reason, we couldn't get that old laptop to connect to the internet to install the updates needed to demonstrate Mint to me in all its glory.

Double phew!

One lengthy boot process later, sure enough, the laptop recognised the hard drive and there was all my data, safe and sound. Phew. Then I had the bright idea that my new computer wouldn recognise the drive now that it had been recognised by the laptop. Et voilà, problem solved. All that remained was to repeat the whole process- because the problem recurred when I when I switched the drive off, then to copy all my data from the external drive to the hard drive on the new machine just to make sure that it is secure. Three hours later, the emergency was definitvely over.

Meanwhile, the shiny shiny?

Wilbur:
looking
good

After all those hi-jinks, what about my new computer? In short, it's fab. Apart from all the usual stuff about the extra power you get when you upgrade, I have to say that a 20" wide monitor is truly amazing: webpages are so much more spacious, and favourite apps like GIMP benefit greatly from the extra width. The only 'downside' is that I'm forcefully reminded exactly how much space is wasted in those green columns on each side of RD/KA!'s venerable classic blogger 'Son of Moto' template. I really will have to do something about this.

Alhambra it is then

The day saved and dinner done, it was too late for Badger and I to start our planned game of Fighting Formations. Liam was visiting too, so it seem churlish to sit down to a game of Combat Commander. Some light 3-player action it was going to be then. I was very keen on a game of Cosmic Encounter but Badger persuasively noted that it's not at its best with 3 players (sad but true). Dominion was mooted by Badger, but it lost out in the end to Liam's suggestion that we play Alhambra.

We played 2 games. I won the first comfortably, although Badger was pleased to come second because he'd never played Alhambra before. The second game was much closer. Badger won in the end thanks to some astute wall-building in the endgame (I played that aspect particularly badly in this game, in stark contrast to the first). Liam and I were tied a mere 1 point behind.

Bagder liked Alhambra. Well you would, wouldn't you, after doing so well in your first 2 games? To be fair though, his liking was evident throughout play, as witness his catchphrase for the night, "In-teresting".

And finally

Gaming website BoardGameGeek has been hosting blogs for some time now. I've taken to reading a few lately. I noticed that some were crossposts from externally-hosted blogs. Why ever not I thought. So I've begun crossposting RD/KA! to RD/KA!@BGG. The major technical issue- translating a post written with HTML tags into a post written with BBcode tags, proved to be simple to solve, thanks to Keynote. I wrote a template containing each HTML element and its BBcode replacement. With this I just have to run a 'Find and Replace' and the whole thing is done in minutes. Lovely, lovely Keynote NF!

I've crossposted 2 posts to RD/KA!@BGG so far and the results are already encouraging, and that's even without illustrations (BGG doesn't offer the same layout options as blogger, and I'd have to upload the images to BGG to use them to boot, so I just leave them out). I noticed a marked spike in readership here. Better even than that perhaps is the success of RD/KA!@BGG by the standards of BGG blogs.

"Appreciate
Connolly,
appreciate!"

As is prevalent across the web, there is a button on BGG you can use to show your liking of site content- the 'thumb'. My previous crosspost garnered itself 18 thumbs. This was only 4 thumbs shy of the top 10 most popular BGG blogs, as registered by the number of thumbs. These 'Hot' blogs stay on BGG's front page instead of disappearing down the roll of 'Recent' blogposts. So you can imagine then, dear readers, how satisfying this positive start is to yours truly; all the more so for reasons that need no rehearsal here.

BTW, PS

And yes, I'll never again yank USBs from their ports before I've 'safely removed' the hardware. Of that you can be sure. ;)