Magic

• Last Saturday’s PTQ was busy and a long day, with 154 players. But, it was fun and a good event.
• Yesterday evening, Jessi found a black longhair cat by our house that seemed hungry and cold, but obviously belongs to somebody due to his collar and friendliness. Jessi let him inside and fed him. Animal Control gave us a collar with a message attached (presumably to call them if found) and told us to put him back out to see if he would go home. He was still on our porch this morning, though.

• I’ll be head judging a PTQ this Saturday at TJ Collectibles.
• There’s a group of people trying to stop the Access Road from Rte. 169 to the Southbridge Industrial Park, in the hopes of having the road go from Rte. 20 in Charlton (and through my land) instead. It seems that perhaps the effort to change the route is a bit late, since they’re trying to stop the Conservation Commission’s approval of the route, and they really should have tried to change the proposed route many years ago. So, I place the odds of the road eventually going through my land as rather slim, but there’s still hope.
• Yesterday Hannah turned 5 months old. She’s still doing wonderful. She’s very much more seeing and interacting with people and objects, which is really nifty to see.

• Last weekend’s prerelease was rather disappointing with the new prereleases-everywhere format. Attendance was extremely below our expectations, and a lot of the players seemed rather unhappy with the changes as well. Hopefully, Wizards will wise up and figure out a better approach.
• I bought a Super Nintendo at a yard sale over the summer, and I finally bothered to hook it up and it works great. I thought that we still had a bunch of games for it at my parents’ house, but apparently they got rid of them at a Historical Society Yard Sale at some point. So, I’m slowly working on buying controllers and games on eBay. But if anybody has any old SNES stuff they’d like to get rid of, let me know.
• Speaking of getting rid of stuff, we may be selling off portions of our Magic card collection that are worth anything soon. To a large extent, the cards are just sitting around our bedroom taking up space. If anyone’s looking for anything in particular (like Judge foils?) before we sell it to a store, let me know.
• Hannah ate her first “solid” food yesterday evening. (That is, baby-rice-cereal-mixed-with-breast-milk.) She did a wonderful job with it.
• I’ll be head judging a PTQ at TJ Collectibles on October 18.

This weekend for the Shards of Alara Prerelease, I’ll be the head judge at:

• Saturday: The Game Castle in Londonderry, NH.
• Sunday: Rising Phoenix Games in Cherry Valley, MA. (With a special appearance by Rob Alexander in the morning.)

This prerelease is working rather different from previous ones, in that there are a lot more locations. TJ Collectibles has 8 event locations this weekend. So, things should be interesting. I’m looking forward to a fun weekend.

• Last weekend, I head judged a Magic PTQ with 161 players, which is rather large for this type of event, and the second-largest event I’ve ever head judged. There was a lot to do (including dealing with a table collapse), but our staff dealt with it rather well.
• A few weeks ago, we signed up with Netflix, primarily to continue watching Star Trek past the Next Generation series. I’m quite impressed with the service so far.
• We’re continuing to go monthly to Scrabble night at the Charlton Library. We may look at going to a more competitive event at some point (primarily for Jessi’s benefit).
• For the Shards of Alara prerelease, I’ll be head judging at some store in New Hampshire (I don’t know the name or specific location offhand) on Saturday the 27th, and at Rising Phoenix Games on Sunday the 28th, as part of the TJ Collectibles network of prereleases.
• I have Jury Duty in 4 weeks.
• Hannah is growing quickly. She can stand with support, and smiles when she sees me, and I’m sure that before long she’ll have the run of the house. She started sleeping in her own room last week.

Due to a last-minute cancellation by the person who was going to be there, I’ve just been contracted as the Head Judge of the PTQ this Saturday run by TJ Collectibles in Hartford.

Saturday, I went to the Eventide prerelease. My lack of preparation wasn’t really an issue, as I was primarily a money-taker again. However, for Shards of Alara, I’ll be up in New Hampshire in charge of a new prerelease location.

Sunday, my brother (who deals with video processing for a living) and I fixed my home digital recording setup that I was having issues with. One of the other things I’d added to my cable system was a distribution amplifier. The amplifier improved the signal for my other digital devices (cable modem, and direct to the HDTV), as well as the devices reading the analog channels, but apparently it was too much signal for the digital tuner on the HVR-1600. We stuck another splitter on just the input to the digital tuner on the card, to reduce the signal by another 7dB, and that apparently attenuated the signal enough for it to work correctly. Rather odd, since the signal level it was getting before should have been pretty close to the level that enters the house, but everything seems to be working for now.

• We recently changed the living-room-DVR computer from mine to my wife’s, since it’s more powerful, and she wanted to be able to play her games while sitting on the couch. We also recently purchased some new hardware for DVR purposes as well, including a 500 GB drive. I remember when 500 KB was a lot. Now, I’m not sure 500 GB will be enough. We also got some additional RAM, but one of the memory modules was bad, so I’ve shipped it back and am awaiting a replacement.
• This weekend, I’ll be working at the TJ Collectibles Hartford Eventide Prerelease. This could be interesting, since my only experience with Shadowmoor was a store release event, and I really haven’t judged since then. I’m looking forward to it
• Yesterday, I received a notice that I have jury duty again. I suppose the last time was more than 3 years ago, but I don’t think it could be much more than that. I found the last time rather interesting (probably because I actually served on a jury), so hopefully this time will be interesting as well. (Update: Last time was 2/10/2005. I thought I would have blogged about it.)

Friday Night: Friday Night Magic at Rising Phoenix Games.

Saturday: Working at the Shadowmoor Prerelease in Hartford with TJ Collectibles. Somewhat to my surprise, rather than judging, I was registering players and collecting money all day, which gave me a useful perspective on the “admin” area. However, it means that I have still not really seen much of the set.

Sunday: Church (both services since I was running Powerpointness, and Jessi was helping in the nursery during the first service), followed by my Grandma’s 85th birthday party, followed by Bible Study, followed by seeing Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

“( is the untap symbol.)”