Myself, my books, and everything in between.
I finally bought myself a decent digital camera. I was getting tired of borrowing my parents camera, which wasn’t a very good camera to begin with. Anyway, its a Canon PowerShot A590 that I got on sale from Newegg.com. It’s not the greatest camera ever made (there is a reason they make thousand dollar cameras), but it seems to have pretty good low-light quality, which is something I have been lacking for a while. Hopefully when it warms up outside I can get out take some pictures soon.
I dumped a few of my scenic photos on Panoramio. Which should be viewable on Google Earth and Google Maps. The photos are mainly from around Wisconsin, with a couple from Chelsea, MI and Schenectady, NY.
I just finished the winter version of my iGoogle Houses Theme. I tried to make it relatively generic in avoiding anything directly related to the holidays, since this theme is supposed to last through February. I’ll need to come up with a Spring theme next and after that I don’t know. I still need to make a theme based off the illustrations from my book.
I went to Gen Con every year through the 90′s up until it was moved out of Milwaukee. I miss it even though I admittedly never took part in the actual gaming that went on there. I did, however, enjoy exploring the exhibit hall and gazing at all the hard-to-find stuff that you couldn’t get anywhere else. I especially liked witnessing some of the upcoming computer games, with some becoming vaporware never to be anything more than a presentation reel. Oh, and the free stuff! I still have a bunch of old FASA posters and trinkets from Gen Con’s of yore.
That was before the Internet came around. Now with video games being announced a year or two in advance accompanied by a website with screen shots and video; seeing these same things live just doesn’t do anything for me anymore. And with the plethora of online stores and eBay, hard-to-find stuff is somewhat less difficult.
If Gen Con can stays afloat, it will be because of the people who go to game with other like minded individuals.
To me, it was a great way to kill a Saturday afternoon. 
A couple of weeks ago I decided to make some swords out of some scrap wood that I had laying around at my parents house. I’ve always enjoued creating things and since most of my creations are not in a tactile form, I thought it would be nice to make something I could touch, that and my Dad has a workshop with every kind of power tool you can imagine… that would impress even Norm.
So far I’ve only made three. I kept the designs rather simple for my first attempts: a square blade and rounded edges. The trickiest part has been cutting the rectagular hole in the hilt cross guard so that it isn’t too big, but just tight enough. With staining, I went with a two-tone stain as opposed to paint. I thought there was no sense in disguising these blades as something they are not.
With my next attempts, I intend on giving the blades more of an edge, a flat diamond shape, to make them more realistic and a little less blocky.
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