Ryan Alexander

I’m looking at getting a ticket this weekend and as I was going through TheTrainLine.com I noticed a new ‘feature’. After selecting my tickets there was an extra section at the bottom:

This journey has been insured with Columbus Direct for just £2.00 per person

We recommend that you insure this journey. The policy covers you from door-to-door against loss because of missed or delayed trains, lost luggage and journey cancellation. Peace of mind starts from just £1 per person each way and you must be under 75 years old.

Important please read: View the policy

Total insurance cost £2.00 (Payment will be collected by Columbus Direct)

With the options TICKED. As in, I had to OPT OUT.

Oh hell no. I wonder how many people have been tricked into buying ‘insurance’ without even noticing.  Even better, I wonder if any of them were over 75, in which case they were tricked into buying insurance they don’t qualify for.  Do you think Columbus will be carefully tracking those people down and refunding the money?

Sorry. I despise dirty web tricks like that. The Trainline should remove that ‘feature’ immediately (or at the very least make it op-in) and Columbus Direct should be *ashamed* of itself.

Was fantastic. Many congratulations and thanks to the organizers and hosts.

At BarCampLondon3 I gave a presentation on the Future of BarCamp. At that talk I proposed the idea of a BarCamp-Oriented BarCamp. At the time I called it BarCamp², however I now think that a better title would be BarCampCamp. It makes a bit more sense, I think (and I won’t have to keep searching for where to find a superscript 2.)

Anyway, yes, I am planning on putting one together. Of course, as it it the holiday season, things aren’t really going to get rolling on it until after the new year starts and I get back from Rio De Janeiro. In the meantime, I’m looking at where to get a venue and sponsorship. I know a number of people who immediately stepped up to the plate to help with this and I’m very excited and gratified by it all.

Right now my intention for the direction of this event is to help enable more people to throw their own BarCamps, and to help get as much knowledge and wisdom out of those people who have already run them as possible. I also intend to make this process as transparent as possible. I think this is going to be the biggest challenge honestly.

So, step 1, Venue, who’s got someplace that would like to host anywhere between 50-60 geeks for a weekend? I’m thinking sometime in April maybe.

Plus a few extras I couldn’t put in the talk at Barcamp

Apples to Apples - Fun easy social card game of matching adjectives to nouns.

(new) Ave Caesar - Simple quick racing game with good strategy, fast to play, makes a great ‘closer’ game for an evening.

Bohnanza - Plant your beans as best you can to make the most money. Stack-based card game where you can’t re-order your hand, nicely encourages cooperative friendly play… to a point.

Citadels - Role-based city building card game, nicely rewards screwing over your neighbor, and loads of trying to figure out what other people are going to do.

(new) Carcassonne - Tile-based land game. You’ll need a sizeable table and a bit of time, but it’s a fun strategy game and has about a billion expansions out for it.

Dark Tower - Retro electronically assisted fantasy board game, race up to three other people to the tower and try to defeat the baddies. Such a damned cool game, it’s been out of print for I think about 2 decades now. However there is a link on that page where you can play it online. Schweet.

Electronic Battleship - Exactly what it says on the tin. Again, super retro, and it actually made the otherwise tediously boring game of battleship fun because there were big juicy buttons to press all the time.

Formula De - An excellent, fast racing game that keeps some very good racing game mechanics, loads of tracks available.

Give Me The Brain! - Zombie fast food card game from James Ernest, loads of fun, great illustrations.

Hero Clix - Collectable miniatures game of super-hero combat. fast game play (especially for a miniatures game) because of special base design. Quite fun for a while but like all collectable games, 12 year olds spending their parents’ money will eventually kick your ass at it and it’ll stop being fun. But worth looking at for the design.

Icehouse - Beautiful abstract gaming system from Looney Labs. There are hundreds of games you can play with these, many of them very good. Homeworlds is a particular favorite, but don’t stay up till 4am playing it (I’m looking at you Jim and Glynn.)

Jericho - Card game of building and toppling walls. Some nice strategy, mostly an abstract game, no real religious overtones to it.

Kill Doctor Lucky - Unlike the last game, a good example of a story that adds to the fun. Basically it’s the story of how you got to the Clue (Cluedo for the UK folks) game in the first place. You’ve got to kill the fellow, but no-one can see you do it!

Lost Worlds - Think of it as a kind of dueling version of choose-your-own adventure. Many different creatures to choose from and all of them can battle the others one on one. Another game worth playing just for the design alone.

Magic the Gathering - The original Collectable Card Game, fantasy battles with resource management, spells and big gnarsty creatures. Cards vary in rarity and strength. Fantastic design, incredible game play, expansions have been coming out for almost 15 years now. Also known as gamercrack for it’s addictive ability to suck all the money out of your wallet, becomes un-fun in exactly the same way as Heroclix.

Niagara - Try to collect gems by moving up and down river but be careful not to go over the falls. Inventive board design, not too difficult to play, good family game!

Othello - That game with the black and white flippy pieces. Hey! It’s over 100 years old! and it starts with an O, what? Leave me alone, they can’t all be gems.

Puerto Rico - Ignore the fact that the little brown tokens represent slaves and don’t try to learn it from the instructions, get a friend to teach you. Help develop the new world and win favor at home in the old world. It is an amazingly good game, currently the #1 game at Boardgamegeek.com

Quarto - Pretty pieces, only about 15 years old, starts with a Q, otherwise see Othello.

Robo Rally - Battling Robots, without that annoying guy from Red Dwarf! Such a damned good game, very fun, but playing with newbies can be painful. To save yourself pain, break in as many newbies at the same time as possible so that you can at least multi-task their infernal faffing. (and no it’s not based on robot wars, it *pre-dates* that show.)

Starbase Jeff - Possibly the best Cheapass Game ever made. Compete with other players to build your part of the starbase. Simple game with deep strategy, I wish they’d republish it! I’d buy a new copy and laminate the cards.

(new) The Settlers of Catan - A really fun game with an ever-changing board, you and your friends compete to settle the new island, building roads, towns and cities. Many expansions make the game even more changeable, but frankly, I got burned out on playing it a while ago. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s still an *excellent* game.

Ticket To Ride - It’s a train game that doesn’t suck! Seriously! It’s fun, and quick and inventive and there’s a bunch of versions of it in case you don’t want to be US-centric! Compete with your friends to connect cities with your rail lines.

Unexploded Cow - Another Cheapass game, but this time it starts with a ‘U’! Actually a funny game, good story, “You and your friends have discovered two problems with a common solution: Mad Cows in England and Unexploded Bombs in France.” Hilarity ensues. Probably not a game to play with your Vegan friends.

Vegas - (as in James Ernest Writes Off Another Trip To…). I like this game not just because it begins with a V but because I’ve actually been to Vegas with James Ernest twice.

Werewolf - A remake of the classic Mafia game, you and your fellow villagers must suss out the werewolves that are killing you off one by one at night. They’re hiding amongst you, and the only clue you have is that Ian is always the werewolf.

XXXenophile - A very fun card game that’s not for kids based upon the Phil Foglio adult comic series. The illustrations are often hilarious.

Yahtzee - I’m not even going to link this one.

Zombie Fluxx - The latest (I think) Fluxx variant, all the fun of the game that changes rules with every play, but now with %1000 more ZOMBIES! What’s not to like?!

I had a fantastic time at dConstruct and BrightonBarCamp over the weekend.  It was great to meet new people and hang out with familiar faces as well.  I will be putting up the list of games I presented on in a post today (unless I collapse after work and exercise, it was a *long* weekend!)

I’ve been accepted to go to HackDay!  I’m very much looking forward to it, despite having absolutely no idea what I’m going to be doing for it.  Gaaaah.  Must brainstorm now.  Hopefully I’ll see some of you there!

Ok, I’ve fixed the Barcamp page again. Looks like Jan Nontivy (or however it’s spelled.) has put the script tag back in. I seem to have caught them in the act, I stole the edit lock back from them and restored the page. Does anyone know who actually ‘owns’ the Barcamp Wiki? Maybe I can talk them into blocking an IP or two…

Ok, someone (who I won’t link to because that’s rewarding their behaviour) hacked the barcamp.pbwiki.com site. They did it by putting a simple <script> tag redirect. Simple, stupid, annoying. I’ve fixed the page but if you find that your own site has been hit by this amazingly stupid exploit, just do the following:

1. take your normal site url (like http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/)
2. add the following to the end: ‘FrontPage?edit=1&login=1′ (so you end up with https://barcamp.pbwiki.com/FrontPage?edit=1&login=1)
3. remove the script tag.
4. save.

BTW, they’re using google ads to get some revenue out of this, does anyone know how to contact google to tell them to not give those jerks any money?

Wow, ok, I suck. I haven’t posted for about mmmm… three months. Gaaah.

For those of you that I met at Barcamp Dublin this weekend, hello! It was fabulous to meet all of you and to talk with as many of you as I had that chance.

Big Kudoes and thanks are due to the organizers of the event! I had a wonderful time and can’t wait for the next one.

Also everything that I’ve said above also applies to the people I saw at Barcamp London 2. err…

I do apologize for letting this go so long without contact. Part of the problem is that I worry that if I don’t post really cool contentful stuff, then the people who read me through the aggregated Planet Python blog will be annoyed.

Speaking of python I’ve spent the last few months programming and very much enjoying working with Django.

I’m not working this week, I’m actually heading back to Minneapolis to visit my family and friends. So there’s a lot of travel going on. But I’m hoping to start doing a bit more with this soon. Also, I’ve finally bought my own domain, and will shortly start looking into hosting solutions so I can be one of those cool kids.

I think I’m going to need to sleep soon, there was a lot of drinking going on last night.

I’ve spent the better part of two days wrestling with a django install onto a mac mini.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe that a significant part of the blame lies with the mac, but I have to say that the django site could do a much better job of saying things like:  “This wonderful linked-to-from-the-front-page tutorial book that we’re working on is in fact based on the absolutely latest bleeding-edge version of django and if you try to follow it using our also-linked-to-on-the-front-page stable-build of django it will probably cause you to hemorrhage out of your eyesockets in frustration.”

I’m just sayin.

Otherwise, I kinda like it.  I’m looking forward to making real stuff happen with it real soon!

New year’s was wonderful, had a great, if hectic holiday season.  Looking forward to the next couple of months which are now getting stupidly busy.  In the mean time I’ve been continuing my painful learning process with ubuntu, which this time, included learning how to recover the system from a mis-typed chown command.  Eeek.  Kudos to the IRC help channel which was actually quite helpful with this one.

I’m also hoping to make it to Barcamp London 2, if I can manage to be in front of my computer during the 30 minutes between the sign up page going live (and no, I don’t know where it is) and the sign up becoming completely full to the gills.  Gack.  Yeah, I’m sure all the really cool kids will be doing it by their phone, lucky bastards.  I’m on Twitter now (rnalexander) but I don’t generally keep up to date with texts as that makes my phone go off about every 3 minutes or so.

Oh, I also suppose I should come up with something to present on.  That’s usually not a problem, I can talk forever…  Just ask anyone.