I continue to love WordPress as a blogging and simple CMS platform!

• All in One SEO Pack – very well done plugin for moving your site up in search engine responses.
• AWS Easy Page Link – I’m surprised this isn’t core functionality yet. I use this for easy linking between posts and pages.
• Contact Form 7 – along with gmail filtering, this is a great way of directing “contact me!” requests appropriately.
• NextGEN Gallery – good gallery, but in my humble opinion, still missing a lot of useful functions, like the ability to specify whether images in galleries should have descriptions below them.
• Page Links To - must-have if you want to have some menu items point to “nothing”, and other menu items point externally, or to some content.
• reCAPTCHA Form – well done anti-spam mechanism for Contact Me forms and comments.
• WP-Table Reloaded – very nice little Table creation utility.
• WP Google Analytics – you know… for gathering metrics on your site from Google…

All the graphics on the site are custom. I used “Function” as the base theme.

I’ve still got some “to-do” list stuff left-over, but the hard work is done.

I was lucky enough to get into ‘Wood Badge’, which is the highest level of advanced Scout Leader training available. It entails two three-day weekends, and focuses more on leadership skills than outdoor ones. I’ve been to management training at work, so not a lot of this was new to me, but it was really interesting to see it all in the context of Scouting. I also learned a LOT about other aspects of the program that I hadn’t paid attention to, like Venturing. The most valuable outcome of the training was the contacts I made, frankly – my Patrol and the other attendees were fantastic to talk with about their experiences in Scouting, good and bad.

Still on Scouts, I decided to accept my pack’s leaders’ suggestion that I take on the Cubmaster position for the 2010/2011 year. I’m a bit trepidatious, only because things are really running incredibly well in the pack right now, and I don’t want to mess anything up. I’m sure I have nothing to worry about, because the leaders are all top-notch, and highly motivated and enthusiastic. We’ll see! I’ve got a bunch of ideas and projects (aka ‘tickets’) from Wood Badge I’m going to be working on in the coming months, and I’m sure I’ll be posting on the subject over the next few years (at least until Jacob crosses over into Boy Scouts).

Yours in Scouting!

P.S. For any Scout Leaders out there who are considering attending Wood Badge: do it. It’s a great experience – and feel free to get in touch with me if you’d like to talk further.

I got a great shot of Rebecca setting hers off. Jacob’s shot didn’t come out as well, but I still think his rocket looks really good. We lost the smaller rocket in the wind – it went VERY high! After we adjusted the launch location to accommodate for the wind, Jacob’s rocket came down in a retrievable location.

This was a fun little craft and science experiment for us, and we’ve already ordered a couple more rockets, and more rocket engines, for use this summer.

Worms ruled the day for us. We tried a whole bunch of baits and lures, but none of the Powerbaits were all that effective. Salmon eggs were pretty good, both bottom feeding (for trout) and bobber-fishing when we heard that they’d opened up the categories for other fish. Jacob was getting some very impressive casts with his rig, but also caught a few trees too!

Anyway, I was surprised at how few people showed up for the event. Maybe it was me, but I expected to see a lot more kids fishing. We’re looking forward to the Upton Police Derby in June, and I plan on showing up early to get a good spot, and bringing both minnows and a few dozen nightcrawlers.

At home, my wife and I use the same PC for our ‘couch browsing’, and since we don’t want to have to logoff & log back on every time to check our email, we’ve taken to using different browsers to handle it for us. She uses Firefox and I use Chrome – just because, when I installed it, Chrome was in beta and I wanted her using something familiar to her.

Having said that, the more I’ve used Chrome over the last months, the more I’ve liked it. Just to be clear, I’ve never disliked it: I just like Firefox more. But I’ve been finding myself more and more lately using Chrome instead of Firefox for my regular browsing, even on my main PC. Extensions have definitely helped here, but I think it’s just the rock-solid stability of it, the incredible ease of use, the minimal U/I approach (ok.. in Firefox this is my fault), and the SPEED.

I know that both Google and Mozilla are paying close attention to HTML5, too, and was surprised to see that, at the moment, Firefox seems to be leading Chrome for HTML5 and CSS3 support, although Youtube’s HTML5 video support is only for Chrome (and Safari) . I suspect (hope??) that this is going to be the next major battleground for web-standards, finally killing the proprietary standards of both Adobe Flashplayer and Microsoft’s Silverlight in one fell swoop. Hey, at least I can dream, right? I’m pleased to see that Microsoft seems to be largely ignoring HTML5, which is their M.O. for any new ‘standard’ that’s not theirs, and am hoping that this means that the IE standard will finally die. Again, probably wishful thinking.

update 3/3/10: DRAT! Microsoft is going to be paying attention to HTML5 after all.

I love WordPress as a CMS. That is all.

But I’m still somewhat nonplussed with the 3.5 system. It’s incredibly complex and some of the details just don’t feel right to me, even with my house rules applied. I’m ignoring some of more intricate details for now, at least until I can get my arms around them. I’m also not really interested in investing in the 4E stuff, given what I’ve read about it.

Anyway, the Pathfinder RPG looks very intriguing to me. It’s NOT a completely new game, and looks to be a very nice 3rd-party take at a revamp of AD&D 3.5 (even though they’re very careful not to say D&D or mention WoTC). I took a quick read through some of their stuff, and it’s very interesting and well done, and is getting rave reviews. I might pick up the core books just to read through them more and pick up some useful details – even then, the characters are only 4th level right now, so if it makes sense, I might just do a conversion if applicable. PCGen is supporting the Pathfinder rules now, too, which is a huge plus.

Anyone out there have any suggestions or comments on Pathfinder?

It’s been pretty fun for me as well: despite the unwieldiness of the v3.5 system, I’ve been able to craft some memorable (I hope!) encounters and NPCs for them to interact with, and the world around them is really starting to take shape. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m using the Forgotten Realms as a base world, but the lands for this campaign are set in a distant location – I’ll connect everything at some point.

The characters so far:

• Feanora: Half-Elf 4th level longsword-wielding Cleric of Corellon Larethian – Masterwork Longsword, Chain Mail – Rebecca
• Calinar: Half-Elf 4th level dual-wielding Ranger (major dps here!) – Masterwork Longsword, +1 Short Sword – Jacob
• Mantis: Human 3rd level Monk/1st level Sorceress – Quarterstaff – Mary Lou
• Fareis: Wood Elf 4th level Rogue with a haunted past – Dagger +2 (quest item), Padded Leather +1 – Jon

I’ve found some really good resources to assist me on our ‘adventure’ nights. Encounter locations are designed either by hand using Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, or using a Map-Making Tile tool. The latter tool was a bit expensive and limited for what you get ($30) but it does allow for quick assembly of most necessary locations. I take the resulting PDF’s and modify them in Photoshop.

I bought Campaign Cartographer 3 along with the City Designer 3, but find the system very confusing and clumsy. I’m spending some time getting used to it, but it’s a tough haul. What I’d really like is an automatic town map generator, where I can specify walls, ports, gates, population, etc. and have the base map prepared for me. There are some freeware takes at this, but you’d think that a commercial product would incorporate that functionality instead of forcing you to start from scratch for every design.

I’m using PCGen for character maintenance. This tool also has its quirks, but I think some computer-based character creation system is a must for v3.5. The d20 SRD site is a must-have for in-play documentation. I keep the books handy, but have thankfully never had to refer to them during play.

Finally, as the pièce de résistance, I’ve taken an old projector and hung it on the ceiling, pointed towards a table. Real-time dungeon exploration is handled via ‘erasing’ a fog layer on top of the map in Photoshop. This is also nice in that I can swap out locations quicky and display previously prepared graphics of monsters. I started by printing tiles and using an old collection of dungeon pieces, but this was very limiting in a couple of ways. The projector-method, while it has its weaknesses, is a much more manageable solution. All the players have to do is move their miniatures on the map, and roll their dice.

Speaking of dice, I’ve been very surprised at the lack of good gaming supply stores around here. There are a bunch of R/C or model stores, but only one store in the area (The Whiz on Route 9) has any sort of selection at all. I suppose it’s understandable that the world of pen & paper gaming has been overrun by computer games and MMORPG’s, but wonder if a well-stocked specialty store couldn’t do well.

Jacob’s car won 2nd place overall for speed out of 60 or so cars! It was a very close match-up between his car and the winner’s, but the 1st place competitor was consistently a couple hundredths of a second ahead. My guess is that it came down to superior wheel alignment, which we’ll definitely have to pay more attention to next year. For what it’s worth, we spent most of our “tuning” time on polishing the axles and proper weight placement, but besides ensuring that the car itself went straight, we didn’t worry too much about perfect wheel alignment.

Rebecca’s car was even faster, which I think surprised everyone! She got 4th place in the “Siblings/Adult” race, and was racing against some previous years’ winners, so that’s a very good showing! Mine was an abysmal 10th place – all 3 of the kids beat me soundly!

Another father and I also ran some fun tests to see if “weight in the back” really makes a difference, and the results were interesting: Jacob’s car was consistently faster going forwards (weight in the back) instead of backwards. However, his friend Jake’s car was faster backwards, which we think might be due to a improperly aligned front-wheel causing excess friction against the track. A better experiment could be done easily by just building a simple car using movable weights. The car itself would have to weigh very little, and have the weights be very dense and properly balanced at extreme positions. Maybe next year, I’ll give this a shot for fun.

The debate on 3-wheeled v. 4-wheeled designs continues too! Other packs in the area require all 4 wheels to be on the track, whereas we allow (and even recommend) 3-wheeled cars. The winner this year ran with all 4 wheels, while our cars all used 3-wheel designs, so there might be something to be said for keeping all 4 wheels spinning all the time.

I’m also reconsidering the axle hole style we used: I re-drilled our axle slots using a Dremel-driven drill press instead of cutting new axle shafts. While holes are more stable, they definitely cut down on the amount of adjustment you can do once the wheels are in.

All-told, we had a great time, and are really looking forward to our designs in 2011!