Gaming Updates, LUV News and Cluster Challenges, Australian Politics

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 13:04:29 GMT

My review of Lords of Creation has been published on rpg.net. Thursday night ran a session of D&D 4th edition to some experienced gamers who had never played it before. Original assessments remain accurate; innovative for D&D roleplaying, heavily influenced by CCGs, and a little bit too orientated towards powers and encounters. Currently pointing together RPG Review issue 21 (computers and RPGs) and prepaing for Unicon sesion for Masters of Duck and Leath. In addition to the online store also have some auction items on Ebay.

Next Tuesday's meeting of Linux Users of Victoria looks quite impressive with speakers from Amazon Web Servers and a privacy expert. Cluster work has been investigative, challenging, and maddening this week; installations of Matlab and SAS with remote licenses and poor graphic forwarding, libraries that are in paths but are not linking, multicore fire dynamics software that works with some quantity of processors but not others (installation wasn't so bad), and installation of bleeding edge R libraries. Finally and appropriately for most things mentioned in this post; happy 30th birthday to the GNU Project. The world would be a much poorer place (technologically and culturally) if it wasn't for people giving their software away under a public license - which is why I will be making a submission against software patents.

Attended a leadership debate between Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese at Trades Hall today; not much of a debate because that usually requires opposing views. Both gave strong speeches emphasising the successes of Labor in government policy-wise (with some admissions of error), condemned the infighting in the Party, and emphasised the new party of being in the community and with new levels of democratic reform. On the other side of politics, slightly surprised by the bumbling of the first weeks in office; university fees and cuts proposed, the NBN board sacked or resigned, and serious diplomatic stumblings with Indonesia over asylum seekers. Perhaps this explains the surge in membership on the Labor-Green Alliance page on FB, and a quick change in opinion polls.

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Gaming Updates, LUV News and Cluster Challenges, Australian Politics