We’re getting some beautiful weather here in Michigan this Summer. This morning I took the dog and went around taking some pictures from around “the yard”.

My dog sitting in the Ranger EV.  I intend to write up some impressions of this vehicle. We absolutely love it. It’s silent which lets us putter around the woods looking at wildlife but still a great utility vehicle for moving things around.  This picture was taken in the orchard.

It’s been a rough year for the bees. I lost 3 of my 5 beehives this Summer. CCD. The bees simply left. Hives full of honey (or were until the yellow jackets stole much of it before I could get to it).

This is the pond we had put in this year.  It helps reflect a bit of extra light on the solar array. There are a ton of frogs and minnows in it.

Another picture of the pond. 

So the iPhone 5 is out and naturally the fans and detractors have lined up.

For me, the iPhone 5 is a no-brainer upgrade. LTE.  I have LTE on my iPad and it makes a huge difference when I'm traveling.  If the only thing the iPhone 5 had was LTE, I'd still upgrade from my 4S to it.

Of course, that's not the only thing in the iPhone 5 delivers.

Here are a few of the things I care about to varying degrees:

1. It's about 20% lighter than the 4S.  I kind of care about that.  
2. It's about twice as fast as the 4S.  I don't care about that at all. The 4S is already plenty fast.
3. It has a slightly larger screen in the sense that it's now 16x9 so it's a bit longer. I don't care about that, if anything it's a negative.
4. The video camera now has dynamic low lighting support. I kind of care about this.
5. The WiFi is now dual-band. This means better performance and range. I kind of care about this.
6. It has a new connector. This means it's not compatible, without an adapter, with all the various iPhone/iPod connectors.  This doesn't bother me as the old one was clunky and dated.

(To be continued)

Screenshots:

I want that scroll!

AI bug found, they don’t put any concern on player build up unless THEY dislike the player.

Roughly even holdings in the world.

First enemy city taken.

They see my build up and try to send forces to take me out. I bypass those units and take their capital.

They want their capital back

Their final, desperate battle. It is the end for them.  They might have won but the AI failed to treat my ranged *spells* intelligently and as a result, they crawled towards me to try to get the first Melee hit. I took advantage of that to use flame dart on them.

…and so to work I go…

The US Ambassador in Libya was killed in an attack yesterday by "Islamist gunmen” blaming America for a film they said insulted the prophet Mohammad.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/12/us-libya-usa-attack-idUSBRE88B0EI20120912

If you’re playing Fallen Enchantress, which is best?

https://www.elementalgame.com/journals

When looking for hobbies, I wanted to do something that got me off the computer.   Not just because all my muscles had atrophied into an E.T. like husk…but mostly.

I’ll update this with what the garden looks like now but here’s what I went with:

Here we’ve got onions, lettuce, parsley, carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes. We also planted 1 little Morning glory plant…My son Alex and I “take care” of this one.

here we’ve got some strawberries, black berries, and raspberries.  My daughter and I work together on this one.

Here is where we planted 3 pumpkin seeds. My Son Ryan and I work on this.

As we head into Fall, the first garden did spectacularly well. Tons of vegetables. The morning glory, however, took over. They’re very pretty but very aggressive. But we still ended up with more vegetables than we knew what to do with. It was great fun.

The strawberries just never came in. Not sure what we did wrong. But they just didn’t do anything. The blackberries and raspberries took off and did great. Our daughter loved to come out in the morning and snack on berries.

The pumpkins did well too but we only ended up with a couple decent pumpkins. Still, very exciting since they came just from seeds.

It’s a great activity to do with your kids.

One thing that we did that made life easier is that we had the raised gardens built. I spec’d them to be the same height as a chair so that you could easily just sit on the edge and work on them (weeding, etc.) which helped make the process feel a lot more like a relaxing activity than work.

Recently there was an article on Wired that interviewed some people about how the death of Steve Jobs affected them.  I was interviewed for the article and how I massively cut down my hours and started handing things off to others as I realized that I was slowly wrecking myself working such crazy hours and being away from my family.

One of the smaller changes is that I now bring my dog to work.  Pictured here is Stardock’s Vice President, Derek Paxton with my dog Bailey.  As I type this from my office, Bailey is sleeping I na little cubby by my desk. 

She’s gained about 10 lbs since I started bringing her. I’m sure that has nothing to do with the snacks people give her though. Just coincidence.

I had read about other companies allowing employees to bring dogs to work but I guess I had this vision that doing so would result in dogs running wild in the hallways and such.  I’ve been surprised at how calm they can be and that they’ll stay near their person.  Paul Boyer’s dog (our art director) hung out with him at his desk which is what Bailey does with mine (when she’s not doing her “rounds” to see who’s got treats).

So this year I took up gardening as a hobby. And my boys wanted to have pumpkins and a few of them have already come in. The best pumpkin has already “detached” itself from the vine.  I’m wondering if it’ll “stay good” until Halloween time. Anyone out there with experience in this?

http://www.nest.com/living-with-nest/

Anyone out there get a Nest?

I was thinking of getting one for our cottage up north. It’s a “smart” thermostat that will hook up to the Internet and let you monitor and change the temperature from remote (along with a zillion other features).

But I wanted to find out if anyone has this and whether they liked it or not.

With any luck, we will have Beta 5 for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress ready to go out this week. We’re very excited to hear what you think of the changes as we move into balance/polish/bug fixing/AI refinement/content mode.

Kael will have a change log up as we get closer. Stay tuned!

Due date is currently September 20.