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Continental Rottweiler at Kublacon 2011

Helen and I were at Kublacon this Memorial Day weekend, as we have been every year for the past several. It wasn't as good a trip for me this year; I was too tired and sleep-deprived before the con...

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Solitaire Till Dawn Update

I get mail—lots of mail—asking me about Solitaire Till Dawn and Lion. Some people seem to be worried that I don't know that the current release won't run under Lion.Really, I know. Really. I know!! And...

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A Little UI Work

I see it's been over a month since my last post, so I thought I'd put something out to show that I haven't been idle. I've been doing user interface (UI) programming, and I have something new to...

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Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Steve Jobs is gone.I never met Mr. Jobs. Although I worked for Apple (and its spin-off, Taligent) for over ten years, I was there during John Sculley's reign and later, Gil Amelio's. Jobs hired Sculley...

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That's the Sound of the Men...

I see it's been a while since I've posted anything other than the little updates in the box to the right. That's because I generally save these larger posts for larger subjects or events, and lately...

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Humbug

So instead of working all day on Solitaire Till Dawn, today I took some time in the afternoon and played a game with the family.I know. I'm sorry. I should have been working. It's just that I'm getting...

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Alive and Well

I got an email recently from a fan who was worried because I hadn't posted anything about Solitaire Till Dawn for a while. I did warn y'all that it would take some time! And that's still true,...

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Gettin' Stuff Done

Nope, Solitaire Till Dawn is not done yet. But I have made a lot of progress in the last few weeks. Here's a rundown:Buttons are now fully implemented and working. These are the buttons that actually...

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Fonts of Wisdom

Previous versions of Solitaire Till Dawn have always used carefully-drawn bitmap images to display the indices (the rank and suit of the card, shown in the upper-left corner). I did this because in the...

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The Mummy's Curse

Nearly a quarter of a century ago I wrote Scarab of Ra. Scarab was my first Macintosh game program. It was written for the Macintosh Plus, a machine with a very small black and white screen. In it, you...

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Midsummer Doldrums

It has, once again, been too long since I've posted any kind of an update. I am starting to see signs that some of you are worried that I am dead, or tired of working on Solitaire Till Dawn—that, in...

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Midsummer Fair Winds

The title of this post is kind of lame, but never mind. I was trying to draw a contrast with my previous Midsummer Doldrums post. Very shortly after I posted that, unexpected events changed my...

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Solitaire Till Dawn: The Last 90%

I am nearly at the end of a three-week "working vacation", time off from my day job which I have spent working full-time on Solitaire Till Dawn instead. It has been both productive and fun, and...

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Retirement!

Solitaire Till Dawn fans: Please see the new Solitaire Till Dawn blog for news about the game. Posts about Solitaire Till Dawn will now appear exclusively in that blog; I am returning the focus of this...

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Almost There

I see that I haven't posted since I retired, last November.There are two reasons for that. One is that I've been terribly busy since then. The other is that I generally prefer to post upbeat things,...

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After the Flood

No, there hasn't been a flood; I'm just being hyperbolic in my post title. The process of selling and buying a house, and moving the family, the cats, and all our stuff to a new state has felt kind of...

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A Bit of Game Design

It seems ages since I've spent any serious time on any of my own game designs. What with the day job (followed, after retirement, by the exigencies of moving to another state), the two expansions I...

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Whitish Christmas

It's not Christmas yet, but if the weather keeps on like this, Christmas might well be white when it gets here. That will be a novelty for us. We're already enjoying the novelty of having a little bit...

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Spatial Delivery: New Cards in the Works

Recent changes to my boardgame design-in-progress "Spatial Delivery" seem to be working out. Last Thursday, over at Rainy Day Games, three kind people gave it a near-blind playtest. They had a good...

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DeckVille

I'm really not keeping up this blog very well, I see. Well, I've been busy, and my other blog over at solitairetilldawn.blogspot.com gets more attention—which is as it should be. But I can't spend...

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More DeckVille

If you read my previous post from two months ago, you know that DeckVille is a euro-style card game that I've been designing in which players compete to build the best districts of a city. Unlike most...

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Finally, Solitaire Till Dawn

A while back, when I realized that most followers of this blog were more interested in the progress of Solitaire Till Dawn rather than anything in my personal life, I created a new blog for my...

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Press Gang

I have a new boardgame design under development. Its name is “Press Gang”. It got its start several years ago, when I thought up a mechanism for players to select tiles from an array of tiles on the...

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Villages of Valeria

Sometimes you get good news, but it's not the right time to make noise about it. And then when it is time, you're busy and you don't get around to it. That happened to me this year with this bit of...

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Villages of Valeria Kickstarter

Re-reading my last post about Villages of Valeria aka Deckville, I see that I promised to post here when the Kickstarter campaign started. I completely forgot to do that!The campaign ended just a...

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