Kevin C. Wong

July 2020

Bundle of Holding - Savage World of Flash Gordon

Flash Gordon bundle consists of

S2P-11400 Flash Gordon Roleplaying Game (2018, 192 digest-sized pages) [$20 pdf]
S2P-11401 Flash Gordon Kingdoms of Mongo (2018, 192 digest-sized pages) [$20 pdf]
S2P-11402 Flash Gordon Combat Map 1: Arboria + Fast Pursuit Rocket [$8 pdf]
S2P-11403 Flash Gordon Combat Map 2: Coralia + War Rocket [$8 pdf]
S2P-11405 Flash Gordon GM Screen + Journey to the Center of Mongo (2018, 32 digest-sized pages) [$10 pdf]

S2P-91101 Flash Gordon Archetypes (2018, 11 digest-sized pages) [$3 pdf]

S2P-xxxxx Flash Gordon RPG Character Folio [$3 pdf]
S2P-xxxxx Flash Gordon Figure Flats Minis [$4 pdf]
S2P-xxxxx Flash Gordon Cliffhanger Supplement (2018, 28 digest-sized pages) [$6 pdf]
S2P-xxxxx Flash Gordon Map of Mongo [$0 pdf]

This is pretty much everything you can get from Pinnacle in PDF except for things that don't make sense like dice and tokens. Store price is $82 (I don't count Savage Worlds Deluxe Explorer since I think most buyers have it already). $23 bundle price so 72% off. I guess the only thing is that it's short on adventures -- one module plus 2 free one-sheets you can get separately.

I guess I'll buy it for ideas if nothing else.

Humble Star Trek Adventures Bundle

Humble RPG Book Bundle: Star Trek Adventures RPG by Modiphius

$1 Tier
  • Next Gen Characters (included in GM Screen PDF) [Own]
  • The Original Series Characters (included in GM Screen PDF) [Own]
  • Starter Set (Quick Start, free) [Own]

$8 Tier
  • Beta Quadrant Supplement ($19.50 or PDF Collection) [Own]
  • These Are the Voyages ($15 or PDF Collection) [Own]
  • Star Trek Adventures Core Book ($19.50 or PDF Collection) [Own]
  • GM Screen ($19.50, includes TOS and TNG characters) [Own]
  • Call Back Yesterday ($5.25) [Own]
  • Ends and Means ($5.25) [Own]
  • Remnants ($5.25) [Own]
  • Trouble on Omned III ($5.25) [Own]

$15 Tier
  • Operations Division Supplement ($15 or PDF Collection)
  • Command Division Supplement ($15 or PDF Collection) [Own]
  • Science Division Supplement ($15 or PDF Collection) [Own]
  • Alpha Quadrant Supplement ($15 or PDF Collection) [Own]
  • Strange New Worlds ($19.50) [Own Print]
  • Klingon Tiles ($10.50) [Own Print]
  • Starfleet Tiles ($10.50) [Own Print]
  • Deep Space Nine Characters ($5.25)
  • Voyager Characters ($5.25)
  • Gravity of the Crime ($5.25) [Own]
  • Hard Rock Catastrophe ($5.25) [Own]
  • Nest in the Dark ($5.25) [Own]
  • Stolen Liberty ($5.25)
  • A Forest Apart ($5.25) [Own]

PDF Collection $105 for $146.50 of PDF
- Gamma Quadrant ($16.25, 11% of bundle)
- Delta Quadrant ($16.25, 11% of bundle)
- Bundle without Gamma and Delta is $82

So for a new GM the bundle is $15 for $180.25 of products in the Modiphius store.

For me it looks like I don't own two products (Voyager Characters and Stolen Liberty, $10.50) and don't have PDF versions of three products (Strange New Worlds, Klingon Tiles, Starfleet Tiles). So the bundle is not worth it for me unless I really want PDF versions of the print stuff I have (adventure book so don't need it as pdf reference and tiles which I can take photos of).

Diary - Jul 18 to Jul 24 2020

Sat Jul 17 2020

Sleep 06:00 to 12:00.

  • Christopher, Dave S, Dave W and I played Gloomhaven via Tabletop Simulator + Discord for audio. It's workable and looks good but a lot slower than over-the-board gaming.

Sun Jul 18 2020

Sleep 04:30 to 11:00. 16:00 to 18:00.

  • Filled out a statement of candidacy for my HOA and emailed it.
  • I found you can do Books app > File > Add to Library... to add audio book files. But can't edit any info so you have to do organizing and metadata editing in Music. I think I'll stick with keeping my audiobooks in Music app.

Mon Jul 19 2020

Sleep 04:00 to 09:30, 12:45 to 16:45.

  • HOA Meeting using Zoom this time.

Tue Jul 20 2020

Sleep 04:00 to 09:30. 13:00 to 15:00.

  • Humble Warhammer Bundle 2020. Mostly just for Blood Bowl 2 Legendary Edition.
  • Christopher added a free-stuff channel and I'm putting my extra Steam keys there.

Wed Jul 21 2020

Sleep 01:00 to 09:00.

  • Got KFC.
  • Received OCS 4-18 Hungarian Rhapsody. USPS Informed Delivery did not mention this package.

Thu Jul 22 2020

Sleep 02:00 to 03:00. 08:00 to 12:00.

  • Working on my self review. Hate it.

Fri Jul 23 2020

Sleep 05:00 to 09:00. 15:30 to 17:30.


Performance Self Review

Self review time, or the most depressing time of the year.

Competencies

Target is from 1 to 5 and is a company-wide scale, i.e. higher technical/managerial levels have higher targets on the same scale). Once you know the target the Performance is 1 to 5 where 3 is meeting your target and 2 is needs improvement. I'll omit the really long explanations as that would reveal too much I think.

  • Core.Change Agility (Target = 3-Skilled) - Driving and responding to change
    • Needs improvement - I feel that there has been a lot of changes recently, a lot of things to pick up and it's been a challenge. I think I learn new tech slower than everyone else on the team.
  • Core.Collaboration (Target = 3-Skilled) - Leveraging the combined strength of my company
    • Needs improvement - I don't know if we get an opportunity to collaborate across organizations. I do work with cpq team and other teams that need help with sales cloud - cpq solution, whether formally or ad hoc emails and slack.
  • Core.Communicating for Impact (Target = 3-Skilled) - Communicating openly and effectively to influence others
    • Needs improvement - I'm not the kind of person who is going to change stakeholder perceptions without good reason and I haven't had good reasons. So maybe it's more like I haven't had to use this skill, which is a good thing in its way indicating we're all moving toward the same target.
  • Core.Competitive Edge (Target = 3-Skilled) - Driving competitiveness and innovation
    • Needs improvement - I don't think I help drive future practices or processes.
  • Core.Inspirational Leadership (Target = 2-Intermediate) - Inspiring others through your example
    • Needs improvement - I don't think I interact with my team enough to lead anything.
  • Core.Mastering Complexity (Target = 3-Skilled) - Making timely business decisions with sound judgment
    • Successfully meets expectations - I think I'm fairly good at giving people how-to knowledge, giving advice and letting them make future decisions.
  • Core.Performance Drive & Execution (Target = 2-Intermediate) - Leading by example to deliver business results
    • Needs improvement - It can be hard to tell how others are doing, and even more so with everyone working from home. For the most part I'm too busy trying to get my tasks done to pay attention to the team. I help people when they ask but I'm not really one to give unasked for advice.
  • Functional.Development.Coding and Unit Testing (Target = 4-Advanced) - Constructs software components as described in the Technical Design documents and translates specified design into implementation language resulting in usable application or application component that satisfies the business requirements.
    • Successfully meets expectations - If the target is 4 maybe I meet it. I would say there are a lot of coding standards and processes and I try to follow them all even if I'm always behind schedule.
  • Functional.Development.Functional Design(Target = 3-Skilled) - Transforms software requirements into a description of how these requirements are to be implemented, including the features, flows, data model, and complete solution components. Provides the detailed functional design of the solution, to be used as input to technical design process.
    • Successfully meets expectations - Example: (url to one of my design doc wiki pages)
  • Functional.Development.Process and Standards Management (Target = 2-Intermediate) - Manages procedures and standards to facilitate the software development lifecycle and deliverables.
    • Successfully meets expectations - My big contribution is being data model poc mostly for opportunity and sometimes leads. Comes up about once a month and can take a while if we do it wrong but then next time I know to avoid that trap.
  • Functional.Development.Technical Design (Target = 4-Advanced) - Transforms functional requirements into a technical description of how these requirements are to be implemented. Provides the detailed technical design of the solution, to be used as input to coding and unit testing process.
    • Needs improvement - Haven't had the chance to do something across LOBs and I don't think I have the customer understanding to do so.

Overall Summary

  • Employee Rating: Needs improvement
  • Employee Comments: Only considering competencies... Mind you I've always thought the competency targets for my level are really high so that I come up short year after year is not surprising.

Humble Warhammer Bundle 2020

Warhammer Bundle 2020 is mostly interesting for Blood Bowl 2 Legendary Edition which I think is BB2 (2015) with all expansions.

Already Own

  • Warhammer 40K: Kill Team (Windows)

Don't Own but Windows-Only

  • Battlefleet Gothic: Armada
  • Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War GOTY
  • Warhammer 40K: Deathwatch - Enhanced Edition
  • Warhammer 40K: Sanctus Reach
  • Warhammer 40K: Space Marine Collection
  • Warhammer: The End Times - Vermintide

Don't Own and Mac Version, but not 64-bit

  • Warhammer 40: Legacy of Dorn: Herald of Oblivion (gamebook)

Don't Own and Mac Version, works in Catalina

  • Blood Bowl 2: Legendary Edition [$30]
  • Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II [$20]
  • Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War III [$40]

So my $13 gets me Blood Bowl 2 at 55% discount and probably still cheaper than a normal Steam sale price. And everything else that I don't care about right now is a bonus ($13 for $90 of Catalina-compatible content is a great price).

Guess I will buy this.

Diary - Jul 11 to Jul 17 2020

Sat Jul 11 2020

Sleep 03:30 to 05:30. 09:30 to 12:30. 16:15 to 18:00.

  • A couple hours sleep so I could go grocery shopping while Safeway was mostly empty.
  • I'm an old iTunes guy so I never really used the Podcasts app on iOS. I really liked how easy it was to setup playlists and control what podcasts were downloaded in iTunes. Now that I'm on Catalina there is no iTunes so I'm setting up Podcasts and we'll see how I like it.
  • I ended up deleting all podcasts from all devices then resubscribe, download episodes, and sync to iPhone (which worked ok) and iPad (which left out many episodes). Oh well, I listen to podcasts on iPhone so that's more important.

Sun Jul 12 2020

Sleep 07:00 to 15:30.

  • Books app now directly stores PDFs in iCloud, which means I can't just store GBs of stuff in Books. I didn't see a setting to turn that off.
  • Sunday is for catching up on sleep.
  • Finally caught up on my Journal and Review pages. I really slacked off at the start of self isolation and it's taken a couple of months to catch up.

Mon Jul 13 2020

Sleep ...an hour?... 10:30 to 14:30.

  • I'm a registered Republican so I get a lot of emails. I donated to the DNC so I get emails from them too. I unsubscribed to all of them. No more emails from the Democrats. Still get emails from Republicans because they don't believe in privacy. Fuckers.
  • Brief power outage and my MBP shut off. Why? It has a battery. Although the other thing is my UPS didn't kick in. Darn it.

Tue Jul 14 2020

Sleep 02:00 to 03:30. 07:30 to 15:30.

  • Bundle of Holding: Shadowrun 5 Essentials, SR5 Lethal Streets, Savage World of Flash Gordon. All three lots of sourcebooks and only one Flash Gordon adventure. Less useful for me as a GM because I'm not good at coming up with adventures.
  • Netflix now you can go to title info and Remove from Row, which is useful to remove half-completed things from your Continue Watching list. It's great because I don't want to continue watching bad movies.
  • Hmm. Disk Utility won't reformat an APFS HD back to HFS+. Probably not a huge problem, though I heard APFS is not slow using spinning drives rather than an SSD.
  • My reviews pages switched to a small font starting a couple weeks back. I fixed it by: copying the text to a separate document, delete the entry, create a new entry, paste the text back. If I just copied, delete/create, paste the issue would persist. Probably an html formatting string being copied and also copied from the last entry when you create a new entry. It's a problem with a WYSIWYG-y html app.

Wed Jul 15 2020

Sleep 06:00 to 09:30. 12:30 to 16:30.

  • It's infuriating how many times I close the wrong tab/window because I don't realize where the focus is. The behavior was changed years ago (I think from slightly shading other windows to just having the close/minimize/maximize buttons colored in focused window) and I still can't always tell.
  • HOA board asked me if I want to be a board member. I guess so if they need to fill a spot so I'll fill out an application for the upcoming election. From what I've seen in the last two elections they are uncontested because people don't really want to devote time to be in an HOA board.

Thu Jul 16 2020

Sleep 06:00 to 15:30.

  • Got an email that I received Watchdogs 2, though it's a Windows game and Uplay app is also Windows. A lot of trouble to go for a free game I probably can't play.
  • Spent a week moving all data out of my Drobo. Reformatted to HFS+ (Journaled). Now starting to copy data back.
  • Downloaded the remaining Star Trek Adventures PDFs from when I bought the PDF set in Jun 2017. It was a preorder and the last PDF was released around Mar 2020 so almost three years for full delivery and somewhere in between it switched from delivery by Modiphius's system to delivery via DriveThruRPG.

Fri Jul 17 2020

Sleep 01:00 to 04:00. 11:00 to 13:00.

  • Lots of Internet problems for many people. I heard that Cloudflare lost a server or something.

Raid SL Clan Boss Team

This is my current team to fight the clan boss in Raid: Shadow Legends.

High Khatun - 6* Level 57 Spirit Support speed buffs, 5* equipment at level 16. This is the day 30 login reward. Put her in the leader slot to give everyone a 19% speed bonus. Other than speed buffs not really that useful in combat but from experimenting the speed buffs make up for switching her out with an attack champion. High Khatun has an immortal set so is constantly healing a bit, useful since clan boss tends to target the leader, and is often the last champion standing.

Reliquary Tender - 6* Level 47 Void Support healing/resurrection, 5*/6* equipment at level 12. Definitely need a healer to keep everyone else up. I got her early on as a random draw and she's been very useful. She has a relentless set so will get a few extra turns over the course of a battle which means more healing.

Shaman - 5* Level 50 Force Support resurrection, 5* equipment at level 16. I think Shaman is a reward for login or something so everyone has her. She's not rated high but I like her as a secondary resurrection (which is better than Reliquary Tender, Shaman resurrects and shields resurrected champion) in case Reliquary Tender is taken out early. Shaman also does a lot of damage, almost as much as an attack champion.

Elhain - 6* Level 60 Magic Attack area attacks, 5* equipment at level 16. With supports out of the way Elhain is my main striker. She's the champion I chose at the beginning and although not rated as highly as Athel (another beginner champion) I've been quite happy with her performance.

Warmaiden - 6* Level 60 Force Attack break defense, 5* equipment at level 16. As an attack champion Warmaiden has a good basic attack (though Shaman matches it) and a good extra damage attack. But she's here for her Crumbling Blast which lowers defense for a couple of turns.

With this team I can do 1 easy battle (maxes out), 2 normal battles (maxes out), and every other day 2 hard battles (warrior chest) to get two or three chests a day.

Bandwidth Usage During Suspended Data Caps

Comcast suspended data caps about mid-March and resumed it Jul 1st.

Jan 2020 = 823 GB
Feb 2020 = 873 GB
Mar 2020 = 4150 GB
Apr 2020 = 5342 GB
May 2020 = 3194 GB
Jun 2020 = 2985 GB

One thing is that with so much Twitch watching I had a lot of stuff I wanted to download. I don't have the hard drive space to keep downloading 2 to 4 TB of stuff every month, so it would have tapered off probably closer to 1.5 TB per month.

As Jan and Feb show, Twitch and other videos are about 800 GB per month. That greatly increased when so many more people started streaming during isolation. I'll be struggling to keep it down to less than 1.2 TB per month of the current data cap. Hopefully by the end of the year Sonic will have finished building out and I can switch to their fiber Internet.

Diary - Jul 04 to Jul 10 2020

Sat Jul 04 2020

Sleep 07:45 to 15:15.

  • Once again got no work done.
  • Good DDO session. Good enough that I'll be buying a copy of CrossOver.

Sun Jul 05 2020

Sleep 07:00 to 15:00.

  • A quiet 4th of July weekend. Only heard a few fireworks going off.
  • Got some work done finally.
  • Comcast starting to backfill data usage during data pause. 3.1 TB in May, 2.9 TB in June. Their automated system marked off my two free overage months though I'm not worried.

Mon Jul 06 2020

Sleep (an hour or two), 10:45 to 12:45, 17:00 to 18:30.

  • Right now I have a main monitor and use my MBP screen as a second monitor. Since the MBP is open I use Touch ID constantly and it's quite convenient.
  • After every Apple Store order I get a survey email but it always comes fairly quickly. This time my order had a problem and it took me a couple of weeks to complain and then another week before I think it's resolved. But the survey link expired (it expires in 4 days). Because of the way it's timed it's less likely to register poor reviews making the survey results overly positive. So I unsubscribed since now I think the survey is useless.
  • MBP 2020 was not syncing to iCloud. Did a reboot, turned off Optimize Mac Storage (just in case), and now watching it slowly try to upload/download 20+ files at once. Downloads went pretty fast, uploads are taking a while.

Tue Jul 07 2020

Sleep 01:15 to 03:00. 09:30 to 15:30.

  • Another night I couldn't sleep. Attended an 08:00 to 09:15 conference call then went to sleep.

Wed Jul 08 2020

Sleep 02:00 to 05:00. 11:00 to 13:15.

  • Received my second USB-C to DisplayPort cable and spent an hour rearranging my monitors. 27" monitor is center, 24" monitor is right, MBP monitor is left (so I can easily tap Touch ID button).
  • Main monitor center means putting the Dock left or right is too far away, so I put it in bottom. If you mouse down to bottom on any monitor Dock moves there, which is not exactly what I want.

Thu Jul 09 2020

Sleep 02:00 to 10:00.

  • One bug with my monitors. After waking up from sleep the smaller monitor doesn't register. Have to unplug both monitors, then plug in the smaller one and let MBP realize it's there, then plug in the bigger monitor.

Fri Jul 10 2020

Sleep 02:45 to 04:00. 07:00 to 12:00.

  • A few hours of work.


Ran Out of MBP Ports

I'm starting to see four USB-C ports is not a lot, or maybe I need to daisy chain things more.

  • 1 port for power
  • 2 ports for connecting to my two monitors' DisplayPorts
  • 1 port to my big monitor's USB hub (and from there I use 2 ports for USB-to-Lightning for iPad and iPhone and 2 ports to connect Drobo 5c and one other external HD)

Theoretically I could daisy chain monitors if they had Thunderbolt and maybe that would also include the USB hubs.

(I haven't tried a large copy to copy transfer using my monitor's USB hub. Wonder if it's more stable than the Anker I tossed).

Reading the specs for the LG UltraFine 4K Display at the Apple Store looks like you use one connection to the monitor and that provides power, access to the 3 USB-C ports and a daisy chain connection to a second monitor. So I guess if I need to replace my monitors (and monitors seem to last longer than computers) I'd get either the 4K (24-inch, $700) or 5K (27-inch, $1300).

My MBP supports the internal + 4 4K displays though what kind of desk space you need for four external monitors I don't know. Maybe a vertical monitor stand array so you get a 2x2 set of monitors with the possibility of making them one giant display.

Anyways, now I see that even a MacBook Air with 2 Thunderbolt ports is plenty if you connected to an external monitor that has a hub. It's only if you connect legacy devices directly to MBA that you'd have a problem.

Bandwidth Usage

Now that bandwidth limits are back on I've been tracking my daily usage.

Jul 00: 53
Jul 01: +28 = 81
Jul 02: +32 = 113
Jul 03: +37 = 150
Jul 04: +33 = 183
Jul 05: +35 = 218
Jul 06: +36 = 254

Jul 00 was pending stuff I downloaded at 02:00 Jul 01. The majority of my bandwidth is watching Twitch (at 160p it's about 180 MB per stream per hour and I often have three streams going so 540 MB per hour), and downloading Twitch VODs (at max resolution so that's like 15 to 30 GB per day, really depending on who's streaming and for how long).

Comcast upped the limit to 1.2 TB per month, or about 40 GB per day, so right now looks manageable.

Twitch Streams

• 160p = 180 MB per hour. At this rate you can tell what's going on in a chess game but can't see opponents names or rating.
• 480p = 800 MB per hour. This is a good resolution for desktop where you can show a big window and have nice detail.
• 720p60 = 2 GB per hour. This is good for action games to see what's going on.

--------------

Addendum, I'll keep track of the whole month here.

Jul 00: 53
Jul 01: +28 = 81
Jul 02: +32 = 113
Jul 03: +37 = 150
Jul 04: +33 = 183
Jul 05: +35 = 218
Jul 06: +36 = 254
Jul 07: +29 = 283
Jul 08: +31 = 314
Jul 09: +41 = 355
Jul 10: +37 = 392
Jul 11: +40 = 432
Jul 12: +38 = 470
Jul 13: +14 = 484
Jul 14: +30 = 514
Jul 15: +22 = 536
Jul 16: +33 = 569
Jul 17: +37 = 606
Jul 18: +27 = 633
Jul 19: +19 = 652 + 75 = 727
Jul 20: +17 = 744 + 99 = 843

Here I tried to download a huge Twitch video so outlier bandwidth usage.

Jul 21: +35 = 878
Jul 22: +36 = 914
Jul 23: +34 = 948
Jul 24: +34 = 982
Jul 25: +33 = 1015
Jul 26: +23 = 1038 +26 = 1064
Jul 27: +36 = 1100
Jul 28: +18 = 1118
Jul 29: +34 = 1152
Jul 30: +39 = 1191
Jul 31: +20 = 1211

Most of the bandwidth is Twitch. I think I have enough where I can watch what I want at 160p and download VODs for BotezLive, AnnaCramling and Neeko.

Diary - Jun 27 to Jul 03 2020

Sat Jun 27 2020

Sleep 08:00 to 14:00.

  • Toasttab, which Zachary's uses, actually calculates tip percentage correctly based on order total without tax. Most other apps don't do that which I think is a bit deceptive.

Sun Jun 28 2020

Sleep 08:30 to 14:30.

  • Set up my new MBP 2020 as my main computer. Installing apps as I need them.
  • Crimped my Drobo USB C to A cable head which caused the Drobo volume to disconnect mid-write and get corrupted. Luckily DiskWarrior 5 saved the day. I should buy a USB C to C cable for faster speed.
  • Noticed my Drobo volume is Mac OS Extended, not Journaled (and Journaled might have prevented the above disaster). It's going to be a lot of trouble to reformat to Journaled since I have to move all 34TB of data off first.

Mon Jun 29 2020

Sleep 01:00 to 05:30. 1 hour nap.

  • Copied com.apple.Mail.plist and ~/Library/Mail folder to MBP 2020. On Mail startup no errors but did not show On My Mac folders. I had to do File > Import Mailboxes and that seems to have worked. It does copy all the mail to a new folder so remember to delete the old folder to save space (I have like 15 GB of mail).
  • Fiddler (a tool that acts as a web proxy so you can log http requests and responses) and Cisco VPN (which wants to proxy everything through a specific channel don't interact well. If Fiddler is running and capturing I can't establish a VPN connection.
  • Oracle College Recruiting assigned me as a buddy to a new hire. Guess I should have been paying more attention to those emails. Did someone sign me up for this?

Tue Jun 30 2020

Sleep 04:00 to 09:30. 12:30 to 14:30.

  • Not as much work done as I'd like.

Wed Jul 01 2020

Sleep 04:00 to 10:30.


Thu Jul 02 2020

Sleep 04:30 to 13:30.

  • Lots of sleep and then sluggish today. Got no work done. Make it up tomorrow?

Fri Jul 03 2020

Sleep 05:00 to 15:00.

  • Two nights of lots of sleep may be too much.
  • Still no work done. There's always Saturday.

Stuff to Watch on Xfinity

  • Midway (2019) [until 07/19/20] - war movie, check
  • Ready or Not (2019) [until 01/02/21] - woman vs murderous family
  • Level 16 (2019) [until 08/01/21] - women in a boarding school/prison?
  • Gemini Man (2019) [until 03/08/22] - Will Smith action/thriller
  • The Courier (2019) [until 06/01/23] - Olga Kurylenko action movie?

I guess nothing extremely interesting. Tends to be limited since I avoid movies with commercials and tv shows.