January 20, 2004
Imaginary Time
A few of you have noticed that there is something wonky with the timestamps of these posts. Well, what happened is that my server has been gaining time for the past few weeks. Yes. According to my computer, it was almost fifteen hours further in the future than I thought (which is why I have all those posts about what I did “tonight” coming in at, like 2pm). I considered several methods to fix this and, after vetting some shipping rates to Cambodia, elected to use NTP to keep my time sychronized. At least, I think that’s what it does. If anyone else can figure out that webpage, please let me know.
The Moral of The Game
I played a lot of games yesterday. Second on my list was preparing for the upcoming semester and just generally getting things done. But sometimes we just don’t get to our second priorities.
It started off with an afternoon of Magic, because Yip invited me to do a draft with his cards (and I’ll almost always agree to play magic on someone else’s dime) I don’t want to spend too much time dredging that experience back up, but I’ll take a little time to describe my drafting strategy:
My drafting strategy was very bad.
The only person I managed to even win a game against was Tim, and that hardly even counts 
After dinner, we played Puerto Rico, a game that I just recently got. It’s an awesome resource management and development board game set in a Puerto Rico colony. Although the game is a blast to play, it started to dawn on me that it might be a little less than politically correct.
To wit: each player has control of a colony with associated buildings and plantations. The way you win the game is by building buildings and shipping goods. But, of course, you need people to work these buildings and produce goods. So, each turn, the “Colonist” Ship comes in, delivering a fresh load of “colonists,” represented by small brown tokens, which the players parcel out amongst themselves and immediately put to work on plantations growing, for example, coffee, sugar, or tobacco.
After a few games of slavedriving, we went over to Andy’s to play RoboRally, a board game in which you attempt (in my case, in vain) to control the actions of a little pewter robot that is absolutely determined to wander its way into a bottomless pit or the path of a laser by playing cards to tell it move one way or another. The goal of the game is to get through a series of checkpoints in order first. Sadly, neither the lasers nor the bottomless pits were checkpoints, so my robot made little progress. I am happy to report, though, that I was probably only a turn or two away from the first checkpoint when Andy won the game.
