Chambers Creek Park, Tacoma

Chambers Creek Park, in University Place (aka Tacoma). Used to be a gravel mine, so has some really fascinating concrete structures. Beautiful park with huge open spaces.

Kite Festival was tons of fun. Took my little one on a play date with her friend. We got bits of wind here and there, so not much kite flying, but it was a wonderful day. They had bounce houses and food trucks.

Food truck with news article saying cash strapped public schools try inviting food trucks.  They had "spiral cut potatoes" on a stick - basically a different kind of French fry, and it was good.  The idea that schools are so cash strapped we can't afford to feed kids who can't afford food in the first place, is depressing and a bad sign for our society.  The food trucks are a bad solution to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Pig Iron BBQ - Seattle local dining

Great local BBQ place in Seattle. You know a mom & pop restaurant is going to be good when 70% of the space is kitchen. And it was good, too. Fun staff, good food, and they have their own store cola, too.

My coworker and I were running client site visits, when he got a flat tire. We located the nearest Les Schwab, left the car, and asked for a local recommendation.  They suggested Pig Iron BBQ, and it was worth it.

I had the BBQ chicken sandwich, and my coworker had some kind of monster healthy-looking green salad with pulled pork piled on top.  He's this skinny thing, but somehow couldn't stop himself from shoveling it down, and repeating the mantra "THIS IS SO GOOD!"

Pierce County Fair - Frontier Park, Graham, WA

Hanging out at the Pierce County Fair at Frontier Park in Graham, WA, tonight.

It's a nice park, with lots of walking trails. Also well equipped with animal barns for those of who grew up around farms.

The Little One loves the rides.  Hoo-boy, do they get you coming and going through.  It seems like all the fairs around here contract Funtastic to run the rides. They do a great job now of selling you a paper card with a barcode, which is then linked to the database.  Each ride operator scans your card, once for each person who is going to ride, and the scanner wirelessly registers the change in value of the card you have, and the operator can tell you how many tickets you have left.

Note that one "ticket" has a value of about 50 cents.  So, those rides that are 7 or 10 "tickets" per rider?  Yeah, you see where I'm going with that one.  Thank goodness I only have one kid!  (Of course, some day, she'll bring her friends along...)

Graham is old farm country, so every time there is an event here, the buildings fill up with cows, pigs, goats, chickens, dogs, cats, rabbits, etc., etc.  We always have fun walking through these.  There are some really weird looking chickens in the world.

Why we love Heroes Unlimited and Rifts

The game mechanics in all the Palladium Books games are a complete mess, but the character generation is so over-written that it's actually kind of a mindless pleasure to indulge in the wreckage and see what kind of character shakes out.

Fort Casey, Whidbey Island, WA

We were exploring Fort Casey today, and I couldn't help but try to imagine it as a dwarven fortress in a D&D world. Most of it is partially or completely underground and it's very hard to see from certain angles. Even the massive guns would be below sight line when in then"loading" position until raised to fire.

Swords & Stitchery - a gamwr blog

Was surfing and ran across this site. I don't have any horror stories of the peryton, but they are one of my memories of 1e DnD.

Swords & Stitchery - Old Time Sewing & Table Top Rpg Blog: The Peryton & The Other Monster Manual For Your Old School Campaigns

Finding a Help Desk Ticketing System

So, I'm tasked with pre-screening helpdesk ticketing systems, because my new employer is ready to make the jump to Something Better.  Here's what I've discovered.

SysAid - dedicated sales people, who appear to be in the US, and will talk to you on the phone, and be happy to customize a demo to your requirements, to help you decide if that's what you want.

ConnectWise - dedicated sales people, who appear to be in the US, and will talk to you on the phone, and be happy to customize a demo to your requirements, to help you decide if that's what you want.

Autotask - dedicated sales people, who appear to be in the US, and will talk to you on the phone, and be happy to customize a demo to your requirements, to help you decide if that's what you want.

JIRA - I could not figure out how the Hell to get to a person. I could demo the product, and a-la-carte order anything I wanted, or view demo video, after demo video to my heart's content, all through the website, but pre-sales human?  Yeah, this one dropped right off my list.

Manage Engine - Look, I know India has a lot of really brilliant people, and they will eventually compete with China as the two Superpowers (displacing the current UN Security Council entirely),  but outsourcing your pre-sales demo to India?  Come on.  I need a sales person who can tell me how the product will work for ME, and my "special needs," not walk me through one of the online videos, and choke if I try to go off-script.  The online demo is absolutely brilliant - I've shared it to show what a real "activity management" product should be.  But, that's about the limit of what I want from Manage Engine right now.

Request Tracker - just don't do it.