Trip There
The trip started around 4:30 from the south of Nashville. I had a hotel just north of Cincinnati, roughly 4.5 hours away. The trip itself was pretty much without incident. Perhaps, the lack of significant weather, which I just managed to skirt to my left for most of the way between Nashville and Louisville KY was different than previous trips where I had to deal with storms for most of that route. Not in 2018. I stopped at the hotel and tried to sleep but failed. Not because it was dirty, not because of noisy neighbors, not because I was hungry, not because I drank a coffee five hours before, and especially not because I was watching "Expeditions Unknown" on TV, no.MEGA-NERD ALERTBefore I left, a coworker and I were discussing a way we could make some data in our Entity Framework for a Dot Net Core application perform some validation and throw errors when that would happen. We had a basic idea, but I did not like it. It was too heavy, intrusive and required us to drop the pattern and basically re-write the framework. Not something I enjoy doing.
Inspiration, usually for writing material, comes during these long solo drives. This time, I got nothing for any of my gaming stuff. Nada.
However, I did figure out a way I thought was elegant and would not force us to rewrite everything if the framework changed.
Since some of you wonder what it was (in real short): I overloaded the .SaveChanges and .SaveChangesAsync method of my context to look for a given interface (also new) and throw an exception if found. This made that readonly. Whipped up a few unit tests to validate and verify, checked it in and sent that to my coworker for his input...
Then I managed to sleep.
It was 3am my time.
Wednesday
Without any games before 1pm, I was able to get up at a leisurely 7am. I got up and drove an hour to the outskirts of Columbus to a Walmart. There, my plan was to buy a cooler (I had forgotten mine) and some food for the con. Later, I had a styrofoam cooler filled with lunch meats, fig newtons, chips, pretzels, and more than I really needed, and a bag of ice to keep everything cool. But at under 40$ that would allow me to live the epicurian lifestyle of mine.
MEGA-NERD ALERT Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who encourage taking pleasure in the small things in life. By making and simplifying expectations, one would live a life of felicity. Therefore for food, one does not need to eat a sumptuous feast to satisfy the desire for food, when a lunch meat sandwich would suffice. He did not discourage the partaking of feasts, just that they were not needed.
It was around 11am when I rolled into the parking lot beneath the Greater Columbus Convention Center (GCCC) and searched for a spot where I could leave my car all weekend. Creating a base of operation for myself. Done.
I acquired my GM badge and went to meet with the Gathering folks with whom I was running events.
It is always great to see everyone, many faces I see but once a year. It also reminds me that I have to get my rear end into gear to write something for Arcanis. It has been a year since I did anything on it...
My first slot was for the latest Rhym adventure, Come to the Hills and it went off. It was a fun time. That adventure is a rather simple, very traditional D&D one, something I rarely do for Saggakar, which makes Rhym so fun to write for.
My evening slot was one of the previews for Akhamet and did not go off. I had the pleasure of sitting a Sean-E's table. It was great fun and I was particularly happy to see Arcanis dig back into an adventure some 15+ years old as a hook. I will have to re-read the adventure because I ran that for Homer, Ryan, Jim, Matt and Kenton way back when... Around 2010-11.
Night was interesting. I will keep it down to the following: I will bring earplugs at future conventions where I share a room. In addition to food, earplugs will be obtained.
No comments:
Post a Comment