September 2009 – Page 2

Seamless upgrade is a plus

General

Jason Kottke waxes philosophical on the Apple user’s upgrade experience:

The upgrade process in each case was painless. To set up the MBP, I just connected it to my Time Machine drive and was up and running about an hour later with all my apps and preferences intact. The iPhone took even less time than that and everything from my old phone was magically there. Snow Leopard took 45 minutes and, aside from a couple of Mail.app and Safari plug-ins I use, everything was just as before.1 Past upgrades of Apple computers and iPods have gone similarly well.

Which is where the potential difficulty for Apple comes in. From a superficial perspective, my old MBP and new MBP felt exactly the same…same OS, same desktop wallpaper, same Dock, all my same files in their same folders, etc. Same deal with the iPhone except moreso…the iPhone is almost entirely software and that was nearly identical. And re: Snow Leopard, I haven’t noticed any changes at all aside from the aforementioned absent plug-ins.

So, just having paid thousands of dollars for new hardware and software, I have what feels like my same old stuff.

I’ve experienced the same, seamless transition: going from my old iBook G3 to my new sexy MacBook Pro, and going from my first-generation iPhone to my iPhone 3GS, and upgrading the OS from Jaguar to Panther to Leopard – once I ran the update process, my wallpaper, applications, settings, and files were all right where I had left them. But I’ve always considered that a feature, a plus, not a negative, because in each case, I could see my stuff running faster and with fewer glitches or errors.

Taking away the jarring transition from one piece of kit to another, and dropping all the files and customizations I had been collecting and making for years prior, forced me to pay attention to the one thing (or several things) that had really changed: the underlying hardware was faster, or the operating system itself was more efficient and powerful.

Out of my head at last

DandD

Last night I hosted my first game of Dungeons and Dragons in well over 15 years, maybe longer, if I stop to think about it. Myself and four others played, and I had the best time improvising and story-telling and being surprised by where the players took the information, characters and setting that I’ve been dreaming up for the last several weeks.

There’s so much I could babble on and on about, but I don’t want to spoil anything yet to come for my players, so I’ll keep that to the barest minimum. And it’s likely the few readers my blog has left may not be interested in hearing about the nitty-gritty work of creating and running a fantasy role-playing game. But once again, as I recall from the long ago days when I played quite regularly, I remember how satisfying it is to sketch out some simple basics – a town, some interesting folk with a history and goals of their own, some economics and basic lifestyle – and have it all come to life when presented to four other creative, active minds. Suddenly my little frontier town, which until now has only existed in my head and in random sketches here and there, and in a handful of statistics from a book, is full of life and intrigue.

I’m also reminded how important it is, as the Dungeon Master, to be careful in how I describe things and what I say. My words are the primary means for the other players to interact with the world, so everything I say and do can be fuel for their reactions and consideration. And anything I forget to relate, like, say, the fact that the little reptilian creatures were reddish in color, or skipping over the dwarf’s grief, shock and horror at discovering a murder, has to get woven into the story, no matter my previous intentions. That’s part of the surprise: no matter what I had thought about and planned previously, the words and the story as it happens with the other players becomes the actual story. So I have to adjust.

But, likewise, I don’t have to be responsible for everything. I don’t want to dictate to the other players things that may relate to their own characters, so if they ask me “How long have I been in this town?” I can generate some excitement and encourage their participation by turning it around: “I don’t know, how long do you want to have been in this town?”

Really, running a role-playing game is very much like being a writer, only with the help of several other authors. And anyone who knows me or has read my blog much can probably guess that I really like story-telling.

So for now, this is a great hobby for me…