Skytower

Building skytowers -- towers that go up as high as possible -- is my new hobby in Minecraft. I'm experimenting with brick layouts, coloring, and designs.

Now Thassa Big Mushroom

...yes, yes it is. Found by wandering around my main world after the latest update. I later found an entire field of large mushrooms of varying types.

Upgrades

Our first 10Gb/s switches! I've wanted these for a while.

Lava Projects

Finally completed a long project on my phone's Minecraft/PE: a glass lava conduit that goes from the surface down a excavated, lined hole right down to the bedrock. It was one of those projects that you do for no good reason and when you are done, wonder exactly why you did it. That's what this is. And it looks OK, might have looked better if it was lined with polished diorite instead of the granite, or if there was some kind of texturing/pattern to the lining. This project took a couple of weeks to complete in the intermittent play-time I allocated to it, mostly because any time I found a granite/diorite/andesite vein I would mine it to exhaustion, and I did the same to any tunnel complexes I encountered on the way down.

Meanwhile on my iPad's Minecraft/PE, I have some lava sculptures that I put together because I thought they might look cool.

The big one on the left is an experiment designed to generate a lava-curtain -- the big block above it hides the block arrangement that lets this be "powered" by a single lava block. It kind of becomes a literal "firewall". It ate a lot of andesite blocks, mostly because I wasn't terribly efficient about how I put it together.  Still, it was kind of interesting to do as an exercise.

The other two are older stone-and-glass arrangements that don't really serve any purpose other than maybe looking cool. And to be fair, they do look kind of cool at night.

Mildly Interesting

This McDonald's kiosk blew its virtual guts. I already knew there was a computer behind kiosks like this, but somehow I ruled out the use of Windows for running it. Shows what I know.

It Didn't Happen Quite This Way

Friend: Can you help me with a Windows Exchange problem?

Me (somewhat later): Sorry I was away, I had the kids by myself for the day.

Friend: It's OK, I used the standard Windows solution on the problem.

Me: What, complain helplessly to the internet, while Linux fan-boys chirp at you with helpful suggestions to dump all your windows systems and replace them with some dodgy open source project?

Friend: Well actually I meant a reboot, but I am planning to replace this whole thing with <project> on BSD.

Me: See? You're ahead of me on this.

Superstar 12th

Alex is at the age now where get-togethers for birthday parties is a bit problematic. Nathan gets a friend party, this year it was at the trampoline park, but we wanted to give Alex something special as well for the day. So Jenn and I took him out for McDonald's ice cream, then a tour of all his favourite elevators, and capped it off with a bus ride to Bayshore for supper, just him and mommy and daddy. I hope he had a really good day that he'll remember for a while.

Happy 9th

For his birthday breakfast, he can have pretty much whatever he wants. So what does he want? A mini cake with vanilla icing and strawberries. Sometimes I wonder if he's my kid since he doesn't like chocolate the way I do.