Weeknotes 12 Oct 2019

Finally getting back into the swing of things before my next business trip next week. Have definitely been traveling more this year than any other.

One thing I'm trying out with my wife this fall is to reserve a night of the week where we don't watch TV and instead work on personal projects. Week one was good so we'll see where we go from here.

Work

A relatively normal week even though I felt a bit distracted with interruptions every time I was thinking I'd be about to focus on something I should be focusing on.

Last night I decide to go ahead and upgrade to Mac OSX Catalina. The main pain for me was that my version of Adobe CS6 was 32-bit and won't work. This include Fireworks which was my favorite graphics app for a long time. I had to finally say goodbye. I hope some older sites I still support don't need any newer graphics which I had in those older apps. Otherwise, most of my apps were ready to go.

The only issue I ran into is one it seems many are seeing. I kept getting asked to re-enter my iCloud password. Turns out the solution is simple enough, to sign out of it, restart your computer and sign in again. The main downside of that is that I lost how I had my Desktop organized.

Movies

This past week the only movies I saw were part of the Alamo Drafthouse's AGFA Secret Screening series. As it was the sixth anniversary of the event, they have double features. One of the more popular double features a few years ago featured Pinocchio. A lesser-known G-rated version followed by an adults-only version.

They continued in that tradition this year with Alice in Wonderland.

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a British film from 1972. The film would be a blast if viewing it inebriated. Thankfully half the audience was which made for a relatively fun viewing.

• Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy was the second film, only the R-rated version, as opposed to the full version they were likely not allowed to show. The cuts made it pretty obvious what was cut out and I was happy it wasn't the more explicit version as I'm sure that would have made for quite the uncomfortable viewing experience as none of us knew what we'd be seeing beforehand.

PARKS Board game

This was a must-buy for me since my wife and I love hiking and we love the 59 Parks Print Series which makes up the art-work for the game. It was worth it simply to have a copy of all the prints in that series on the game's park cards.

The main mechanism of gameplay feels a bit like Tokaido, which is itself a fun game. You have two hikers (because you shouldn't hike alone!) who travel a trail collecting tokens like water, sunshine, mountains and trees that you'll exchange to acquire park cards.

Each season the trail gets a little longer, so you have more chances to score as the game progresses.

Park cards have points. You can boost your end-game score by taking photos along the journey and succeeding at a secret task you choose at the beginning of the game. The player with the highest number of points at the end of a full year, four seasons, wins. In the games I've played thus far, the scores have been very close.