Christmas 2008

Christmas in 2008 was weird.  The snow here in Portland was so out of the ordinary that we didn't have things happen quite the way we expected them to.  A few presents that we intended to get were left out (I never got back to the store after I decided what I was going to get Dawn... and it's not like I left it until the last minute!).  Also, we ended up getting packages out to family late, and things sent to us arrived late as well.

Here are some pictures of Christmas Day.

In fact, we ended up having a "second" Christmas this year, on New Year's Eve.  It was good timing, actually, as we had gotten the package from my mom a couple days previously and, about a half hour after we opened those things, the package from my brother arrived.

Oh, and one more note: One of Bryana's presents came with a promotional DVD of space came.  Between that and the space helmut, Bryana has now decided that she wants to go to space camp earlier than she had wanted to before... so that may be only a year or two out as an adventure for her.

Reviews

When you write something, reviews can make or break your effort.  While I accept this, and I was looking forward to Index Dice being reviewed, I must say that I was frustrated at one of them that showed up.  (I will quickly say that the first review was excellent... he had some complaints, but they were constructive criticism.)

Frankly, the issue is that you should write something helpful to the developer, don't just complain.

He said: "It's not zilch nor it should be compared."

Okay, fair enough.  Although, I didn't promise it would be zilch, I said it was similar to and that the rule customization would allow you to get close.  Of course, in some searching on the internet, the first two rules sets I found online - one was very similar to how I have Index Dice set up, the other was a bit different (and ironically claimed that the game didn't have many variations).  I'm not sure what to think, but since this user didn't tell me what's wrong, I can't fix it.

He said: "It would be great if it had record keeping. Stats."

This is a good point and I agree wholeheartedly.  It's on the to do list...

He said: "It also has very suspicious rolls. Almost always when the pc id down it gets a very hi score."

This is funny, at least from where I sit.  I can honestly say that the rolling mechanism has no idea "who" it's rolling for.  I can also say that the AIs are very simple (I keep meaning to make them smarter) and pay no attention to how many points you have or if you're close to winning. (They do, however, know if you are about to win because you went over the limit.  They will keep rolling at that point until they beat you or bust.)

This is similar to the turmoil about iTunes and the iPods being non-random.  This is a classic example of observation bias in statistics.  The observer is remember some data points better than others, specifically the ones that are more significant.  For example, I thought for a time that it wasn't rolling the dice when you passed, since I would see a four replaced by a four.  When I actually took the time to write down what was happening a few times in a row, I could see that this wasn't the case... my brain had just filtered out what it considered to be the "significant" events and brushed the others under the rug.

So, while I understand that it might appear that the computer has some awesome run at just the right time, I can assure everyone that I have many other things I'd rather be doing with my time than making the game arbitrarily more difficult to play... like adding stats.  

Snow!

It's snowing in Portland now... this may be the first time we've seen this much snow before Christmas since we've moved here.  At any rate, this is also the first time that Allison has really experienced snow (last year was only a dusting just after Christmas, and it had basically melted by the time we went outside).

Fortunately, since we had hoped to go sledding around Thanksgiving, Dawn had already gotten some snow pants for the girls... so we could go out without worrying about getting too cold (although I still held them to only about a 1/2 hour for now).

While we were out there, it picked up again, so it looks like we may have a good amount by tomorrow.

Pictures

Index Dice is live in the App Store

It's live!  I submitted the app Saturday night and Apple approved it last night.  Strangely, searching for "10000" isn't very effective, but searching for "farkle" or "index dice" is (well, of course on the last one).

I was planning to take some time off, and then slowly add some more features, but since there are about 6 other Farkle clones in the app store already, I've started working on the next feature set for release, to try and complete a little bit.

Next up: Scoring variations, since everyone plays different, I want to allow different rules depending on how each person likes to play.

After that: Horizontal viewing, showing detailed statistics, maybe other stuff... I haven't nailed it down completely yet.

We will pie you!

I'm not a big fan of fund raisers... not sure why, since I think they're for good causes.  I think it has to do with never getting anything fun out of them myself when I was younger.

Well, not so with Bryana.  In her first major fund raiser, in which we made her pitch her school's cause to various people around the office and family (instead of doing it for her), Bryana managed to set the record for the largest number of contributions.  As a result, she was one of five or six students that were honored with the chance to put a pie in the face of one of the school faculty.  In Bryana's case, the PE teacher.

So, to cheers of "We will, we will pie you!" (to the tune of "We will rock you")... Bryana delivered a pie to her PE teacher.

All in all, the school raised around $11,000 - which was just a touch shy of the $12,000 goal that they had.  So far, we've been impressed with the involvement of the PTA and the community at Tobias, the kids really seem to feed off the energy of the staff and I think that makes for a better learning environment.  We're happy to have Bryana there!

Birday!

Thursday night, we did a low key birthday party for Allison. Since she's only two, she really doesn't have any internal concept of "friends" and we are busy enough that doing something with just immediate family seemed like a good idea anyway.
When we got to the mall, I started to unbuckle her from the car seat and she looked at me and said "ma birday!" (at least, that's what I heard). I asked, "Is is your birthday?" and she replied, "Yeah!"

In the mall, we had a bag with some presents in it that we let her open. My goodness do kids like paper products...

iPhone programming: 10,000

For those of you who don't know, 10000 is a dice game that a few of us play in the family.  It's something that you can kind of count on us playing at a family gathering, since it only takes six dice and as many or as few players as you can stand.

My brother and I have been talking about what it would take to put the game on the iPhone and - of course - that was one of my excuses for getting an iPhone in the first place...  I really want to program something for the phone.  Consequently, I have finally done something about it and I'm about 1/2 way done with the programming with my brother doing some QA work for me.

I can't say for sure when I'll release it... but it seems to be coming along well, so I hope it'll be soon!