The Fryhole

So, about World of Warcraft.  I’ve been playing it about 6-8 months now, and I’ve just now encountered something that largely pulls it into question.

I’ve always been annoyed at the seeming lack of any real economy in World of Warcraft — the auction houses seem poorly implemented (no history, extremely expensive to list expensive items for extremely short times, and so on) and there is no “shop” functionality.  That said, at least it is something, and as much as it annoys me that it is so incredibly limited, it could be worse.

It just got worse.  I just discovered that for each manufacturing profession in the game, the best stuff is bind-on-pickup when you create it.  That is, as soon as you create something it is bound to you, specifically, and you cannot sell it, trade it, or otherwise move it around.

Words cannot convey the depths of my contempt for this fact.  Not only is it clearly styled to completely forego the formation of anything approaching a real economy, but it also largely restricts reasonable choice-of-profession.  You want to be a blacksmithing mage?  All well and good until you try and make the special, high-end stuff — then you can’t use it.  Should’ve been a warrior blacksmith.  Want to be a druid tailor?  All well and good, but you really should have been a leatherworker.

Tying professions to a specific class or to class-abilities is out-and-out ridiculous, particularly as it isn’t made clear during the process (i.e. the “Blacksmithing” trainer doesn’t bother looking at the young mage and saying “Are you sure?  You won’t be able to use some of what you can make, and neither will anyone else.”)

Not only that, but because the item is soulbound to the creator immediately upon creation; what is the point of learning the pattern?  You can create as many as you like after you learn the pattern, but why create more than one?  The entire money-sink is for you to learn the pattern, build one item, and then ignore that pattern forever.

I can frankly say that of all the idiocies and foolish things I have encountered over the years, this takes the cake as the single most bone-headed design that I have ever seen.

So, if you sit on Freenode long enough, you might get some… odd… things that happen to you, apparently. Like this conversation, for example.

17:41 [jjj_] hello! do you run any servers?
i’m looking for someone to host some cool new web 2.0 apps…
17:41 [Eraos] Yes, I do, and no, you can’t.  Sorry.
Look into cheap VHOSTing for yourself, I would suggest.
17:43 [jjj_] no i can’t what?
17:43 [jjj_] thanks though
17:44 [Eraos] No, you can’t host the cool new web 2.0 apps
on the servers that I run.
17:44 [Eraos] No problem at all.  Good luck.
17:44 [Eraos] Strictly out of academic curiosity, what would
these cool new web 2.0 apps consist of?

Unfortunately, jjj_ went completely quiet after my query. I guess I’ll never know what ‘cool new web 2.0 apps’ I won’t be hosting… which is actually too bad, because now I’m slightly curious.

Where else could this post possibly fit, except for A Room with a Moose?

Well, I’ve just added two companies to my “list of perpetual ignorage”.

• CCP
• White Wolf

I can’t stomach the way that CCP has dealt with it’s customer base over the entire t20 cheating scandal, although shockingly it isn’t particularly different than how they have handled things in the past, when I look at it. Perhaps I just needed something big enough for me to sit up and say “Wow. That is so not cool.”

Extremely unfortunately, that means that White Wolf gets added to the pile as well, thanks to their merger with CCP. Which is too bad, because I really like their systems, and they have in no way annoyed me, other than their merger with CCP.

For anyone thinking of playing EVE Online, I urge you to reconsider. There are any number of things that are wrong with the game, and I could go into an exhaustive list, but I will not bore you. The thing that matters most is that if you really want to feel like a completely contemptible human being that is not deserving of honesty or attention, then go to a 24-hour convenience store and take a really, really long time to pay (count those pennies!) right before the poor clerk’s break, so that you are actually eating into their break. Afterwards, voila! You have just dealt with CCP, only it was short — it doesn’t drag on and on — and best of all you don’t have a subscription to that convenience store or clerk. You can go to another one, elsewhere.

It was probably also cheaper, and you have something to show for it.

Happy New Year, and welcome to 2007.

In this new year, don’t be beholden to the old ways of spreading files around. No longer is it necessary to deal with those archaic torrent files! Be a part of the future, and sign up for usenet.

/sarcasm

This was predicted a long time ago by someone I know — I wasn’t sure if he was right, but a company using “usenet” and “Next Generation Downloading” on their front page in late 2006/early 2007 has just proven me wrong… and it’s crazy enough to make me tag this A Room with a Moose.

Andrew, I owe you a drink.

So… I play World of Warcraft on both my laptop and on my desktop. I want something to keep the addons and settings in-sync (particularly Auctioneer and Outfitter data)… I’d been contemplating setting up a Subversion repository to hold the data (`svn up` before play, `svn commit –message=”I like cheese.”` after play) but I thought that’d be a bit like stomping on an anthill with a meteorite. As well, the Auctioneer data can get a bit big, and I didn’t particularly want the expense of committing it whenever I closed World of Warcraft down.

Thus I opted for something a bit lighter-weight. I shared out my World of Warcraft directory from my desktop, and then considered how to auto-pull the data from the desktop to the laptop when it was available (and push it back when complete).

Silly me, I opted to try using AppleScript, as I really never had a chance to play with the language before. It should be easy, though, right?

Infuriatingly easy.

… Right?

I managed to get the Mac laptop to mount the Windows SMB share in about 10 minutes of toodling about; and I figured with that the hard part was over. I mean, after that (and it was fancy, too! If it was already mounted it didn’t try again, and it caught mount failures properly and errored out.) all that was left was to:

1. Copy files from the share to the local World of Warcraft directory before launching World of Warcraft.
2. After World of Warcraft terminated, update the files on the share with those from the local copy.

These here (for any of you out there who don’t happen to be programmers) are trivial points.

I couldn’t get it to work. Three and a half hours later, here I sit — the AppleScript thrown out the window and very little chance remaining I’ll ever try to do anything with the language again. I mean, what is the right response, when all you can get out of the language is messages like “Can’t make class cfol of application System Events into the expected type.” and “Can’t make some [sic] data into the expected type.” and finally “Can’t make some [sic] data into the expected type file alias.”

It shouldn’t be any more than:

duplicate sourceFile to destinationFolder

… which is what all the examples that I can find display. None of them mention “class cfol” or “some data” error messages. I have no doubt I’m missing something stupid (I’m wondering if it has to do with the source folder being on an SMB share? But that doesn’t make any sense, because what is the sense of the abstraction done by the OS if a scripter has to worry about such things?), but Apple has thoroughly outsmarted me. I haven’t a clue what it is.

Nor will I ever. I’ll leave AppleScript to whomever Apple has targetted it at (Soccer Moms? Grand-Parents? Geriatric Patients?) and stick with BASH.

At least then there’s a good ol’ `cp` command that doesn’t screw around and just lets me copy a file (-f for overwrite, even! The future is here, today!).

Yeah, yeah, call me a quitter if you like. I admit it… I’ve got a dread fear that cfol will delete my home directory if I push it too far.

I got Star Trek Legacy (for PC) a few days ago, and I just finished it tonight (just now, as a matter of fact). It’s an interesting game — a cross between action/shooter and RTS, and it takes you through the Star Trek timeline right from it’s beginnings in Enterprise up through The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager, letting you fly pretty much all of the interesting ships throughout (federation, klingon, romulan). That they manage to cover that length of time in a story arc is impressive.

It is an interesting game, to repeat myself. It isn’t great — I wouldn’t call it wonderful. It’s definitely fun, but it’s also a direct port of an X-BOX game, and the limitations of the system and the fact that a PC is not it’s native platform are fairly evident… and the only reason I wouldn’t call it wonderful is because of the limitations of the game (some platform, some contrived).

The graphics are great (if you have a bit of tolerance for clipping), the ships are detailed and have a good damage model, and while I’ve heard that some don’t like it because it is too arcadey; the control structure and speed of the game seemed just right to me. You can spend a great deal of time in the overview, ordering your ships around without specifically watching what any one ship is doing. Likewise, if you so choose, you can spend a great deal of time piloting one of those ships (and having the others follow you), closely controlling target selection. It is a great mix of shooter and RTS, and it’s one of those games that you can drop into for 20 minutes a night.

If I could stop this discussion there, and all the assumptions that you no doubt have were correct, then I would have no quarrel with the game at all and it would be what I would term as a “great” game. Unfortunately, I cannot do that. The limitations upon the game are too large.

For example, the largest fleet you are able to actively control is 4 ships (you access the ships through the number keys 1-4). This makes no sense at all (why stop at 4? Why such a low number? Why not the whole nine yards with dozens of ships forming battlegroups?) at first, until you consider that the game was designed to be played on the X-BOX. What is trivial to do on the computer with so many keys and a mouse would be much more complicated on a system like the X-BOX. Purists may argue that technically you can control more than 4 ships (during the game, you have the opportunity to rescue ships, and if you do they “assign” themselves to one of your ships and tag along — moving with their “master” ship and shooting what it does, etc.) — but I really don’t consider that control — more like henchmen. They’re good for adding firepower but other than that really don’t have a lot of strategic uses.

They make some strange choices, even in your managing of those four ships. The concept of the game is that you command the Enterprise, and usually a vanguard of 3 other ships (forming a battle-group of 4 ships). Yet those ships need to be micro-managed. For example, if a Galaxy-class ship gets shot up badly during a fire-fight, it does not bother to start repairs until you manually select it and tell it to fix itself.

Imagine that for a moment. A captain (presumably a veteran) on the bridge of his Galaxy-class ship, the sparks falling from the ceiling the only illumination in the bridge other than the red-alert siren; the turbolift doors ajar; smoke in the air; and the engineering and science consoles flickering as they struggle to operate.

“Sir, enemy destroyed!” the tactical officer enthusiastically says. “I’ve already signalled the admiral.” (the ships are good about telling you when they have destroyed a target)

The captain then looks around, nods at a job well done, and rearranges himself in the command chair. “Very good, Mr. Wurf. Send the admiral a damage report, and then wait for his orders.”

A moment of silence passes as the Chief Engineer pulls himself together, bleeding lightly from a gash on his head. “I will start repairs,” he mutters dazedly as he reaches for the engineering station controls to dispatch his repair-lackeys.

“Oh nonono,” tuts the Captain. “No rush.” The Chief Engineer’s hand grinds to a halt. “You never know, the admiral might not want us to repair,” the Captain explains with a note of reproach in his voice. Clearly the Chief Engineer is a grave disappointment.

W… T… F…?

Particularly galling is the fact that they do some things so well! For example, the ships are very good about shooting what you tell them to, when you tell them to, and seem to concentrate fire whenever they are able (even if you aren’t there to tell them to do it). They quickly destroy enemies, and they try to work as a team — I can think of many straight-RTS games (not even RTS/shooter mergers like Star Trek Legacy, but full-on strategic RTSes) that don’t have that level of intelligence. How many times do you have a dozen units standing guard that are attacked by 8 other units, and they all seem to pick their own targets rather than the far more efficient route of concentrating their attacks? I don’t have a count, but I know that it’s shamefully high.

Also, the ships model damage fantastically well in this game — over the course of the mission the external hull of the ship transforms from a pristine starship into a pitted, scared, flaming wasteland as fire comes in and scores it. Even after you repair all of a ships systems to full strength, that scarring and pitting doesn’t go away… which makes complete sense, as who the heck would go out to repaint the hull and buff out those scuffs when you’re trying to run down a Romulan Warbird? In addition to that, the ship systems themselves model damage — take any ship in your fleet, get into a firefight with it; and as it gets damaged it starts doing everything worse. It moves slower, it’s weapons systems have less offensive power, etc. It’s great to see that level of detail… and it just gets better as you go into the engineering aspects of the game.

You can allocate power on your ships (albeit in a very simplified way), splitting it between offense, defense, and engines. The system works well, is quick to master, and is convenient enough to be used (you can even select multiple ships, and then your assignments apply to all of them). To take it the extra step further, it really has a noticeable impact… weapons hit harder with extra power to them, and impulse and warp are both improved with power to the engines. I assume the same is true for defence, but to be perfectly honest I never had occassion to transfer energy to shields… weapons always seemed a better choice.

Honestly, even though it’s simplified, I really think it is a very good implementation. It is the difference between planet management on Master of Orion and Master of Orion II — the difference between choosing general trends and micro-managing everything yourself. For secondary things like that (power management in Star Trek Legacy and planet economic measurement in Master of Orion) I much prefer to set trends and let my lackeys figure out specifics while I concentrate on the core of the game.

… and then they do something like the “repair” fiasco. Ugggh. The Star Trek curse strikes again. As much as I whine about it, though, it’s a small thing, isn’t it? I bet you’re thinking so; and you’re partially right. That by itself isn’t near enough to stop me from playing the game for hours and hours.

The ‘gotcha’ is that you can’t. I beat the entire campaign from start to finish in something like 6-7 hours. I can remember when a friend got Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance for the X-BOX, and we played it through in a day (11-12 hours, if I recollect correctly) and felt righteously ripped off. This, though… this game. Wow. Ridiculous.
I was hoping to play through the Federation campaign, and then do the Klingon, and then the Romulan, and then… nada. The Federation campaign is it, and it is short. There is no more. Which means, of course, that you never play a Romulan ship, and only very rarely do you get to control a Klingon ship when playing single-player. More than slightly miffed at my hopes of another campaign being dashed, I went to the Federation campaign again, hoping to play my favourite missions once again.

Nope. You can either ‘Continue Campaign’ (which means you play the last mission, as that is where your last save point is) or you ‘Start Campaign’ (which means you start over from the beginning). There is no option to play an arbitrary mission that you happened to have liked. Further (I don’t know this, but I’d give good odds on it being true), I bet that if I did choose to start a new game, then the first save point (there is one between each mission) that I encountered would over-write my save point at the end of the game, and then to play the last mission I’d have to play through the entire game again. God help my soul if I felt the need to play a mission in the middle of the game — I’d probably have to start the game from scratch, play right through to it, then play it and very carefully not save the game after I had beaten it, so that I could come back to it and play it again if I wanted. Of course, the very next day I would wake up and want to play the mission before it… who designs these things, and what precisely do they have against their players?!?

There is a skirmish mode that they presumably meant to add a little longevity to the game, but it really doesn’t. The fun thing about the missions was the objectives, and the skirmish mode doesn’t have any of relevance. It just drops you into a fight against a bunch of opponents. That’s all, fight to the death. Boring.

Some might cry out “Oh, but the multiplayer!” Bah. Similar to the skirmish mode, and I simply don’t see human intelligence or skill to be large enough of a factor to make it better. There is no real chance of being surprised, either, as you can hardly modify your ships to be surprising. Oh, look, a Steamrunner-class destroyer. I wonder what that can do?

Oh, wait… the exact same thing as every other Steamrunner-class destroyer. The only reason other games can get away with this sort of thing is that their units have special abilities (i.e. the Hydralisk and the Zergling are two very different units in StarCraft).  Attention: you cannot get away with that if all of your units share the exact same attack methods, and the only difference between them is a difference in attack power.  There is no depth here, for ship-to-ship combat. I play EVE Online quite a bit, and it has depth in the ship-to-ship combat.  This is simply a matter of “the larger ship wins”.

Unless, of course, one of the commanders forgets to tell their zombified Chief Engineers to repair.

No, the only depth that was to this game was the campaign, with it’s missions with interesting objectives. It is too bad that it is so savagely short-lived. The game had so much promise, and did so many things well. It is disappointing that they forgot to put much game in it, after sorting out so many (though not all) of the mechanics so well.

C’est la vie. The Star Trek curse lives on, to ruin games in future days.

Our trip is rapidly coming to a close — just a few more days in Bangkok left. Bangkok’s not a very clean city, but it is a nice place to shop and buy poison traps souvenirs for everyone back at home.

Hahahaha I had you going there didn’t I? You’re not getting anything.

Yesterday we (”we” being myself and Angela) shopped around a fair amount and even visited the adult district of Bangkok — honestly, I was underwhelmed by it. The shows didn’t strike me as erotic or sexy at all; rather just… weird. Somewhat disturbing. Strange. It’s like watching a freak-show. It was worth seeing once; but not at all sure that I would go back again. Angela’s more happy though; ’cause apparently she was treated much better due to being in the company of a boy (last time she went it was her and a female friend and apparently they were denied access to a few of the clubs, the ones with the ‘best’ shows, etc.) So it was perhaps her first time seeing some of the… weird… stuff, as well.

I’m proud to report that I witnessed the second coming of Jesus yesterday evening, though — and he’s no longer a dude! He’s now a very nice lady that can turn water into cola like magic. I’ll leave that for you to imagine, considering the preceding paragraph. You read it, you can’t un-read it.
Mom and Dad are spending their time visiting the palace and temples, etc., but honestly I am pretty temple-ed out at this point, and Angela has already seen all of that… so we’re spending our time out and about, trawling the shops for cool things and just generally being pretty lazy. It works out well.

It is raining right now, though, so we opted to spend some time doing posts and documenting things, catching up on what we’ve been slacking on. So, for your pleasure (beyond this nightmare-inducing post), we’ve also written about:

• Nara, on November 9.
• Osaka Universal City, on November 10.
• Osaka Castle, on November 11.
• Himeji, on November 12.
• Hiroshima, on November 12.
• Fukuoka, on November 13/14/15.

I promise that none of those posts will leave you as scarred as this one did.

First a note about IE7: I’ve never before seen such a horribly mangled and confusing interface to webpages. Kudos to MS for out-doing themselves once again. At least the pain is spread evenly between the users and the web-developers for this revision. If the web browser is going to be hard to develop for; it should be hard to use as well. It’s only fair. Perhaps there is a setting somewhere to ‘fix’ the interface; but I surely know that I don’t want to open that particular Pandora’s box. Oh, and what interesting render bugs, as well!

Fortunately, today was clear and sunny again — though sorry, still no pictures. Began the day with a wandering down the beach to see the sand crabs that Angela reported yesterday. Took about a 30 minute walk to get down the beach far enough to see them; but see them I did! Most are very tiny, with only the odd larger one. The tiny ones seem to let you get closer to them than the large ones do… as soon as you draw even a little bit close to one of the larger ones it scuttles off into the foam and is lost to the ocean in a few seconds. I guess the little ones are younger and not yet seasoned enough to evade humans with such proficiency.

After that adventure and a brief interlude at the room to get ready we were off to the dive center. Took about a 20-30 minute ride from the resort to the dive center; which is in the Royal Phuket Marina on the east coast of Phuket (opposite coast from the resort). It is a very nice establishment and immediately upon arriving there we jumped aboard the diving speedboat that was all prepped and ready and headed off. The boat moved really quick and about 30 minutes later we were at Shark’s Point and ready to go into the water.

During the first dive of the day (a 1-hour, 17 meter dive), we actually did see a leopard shark — it was very cool; just sitting along the bottom of the ocean and remaining still — perhaps all the divers that were swirling around it were actually scaring it. It was difficult to see because there were so many dive groups around the shark — I’d say about 10-15 divers total, all clustering around the shark. Poor thing, but it really was a sight to see.

While the leopard shark was undoubtedly the hilight of the first dive, we saw quite a few underwater critters as well… there were alot of sea urchins out there, as well as scorpion fish, angel fish, and rock fish. The other rather cool critter we saw we aren’t sure how to identify. It was squid-esque, but it had very short tentacles and a rather large, oblong head around which a fin circled. The dive master tried to close in on it a bit; but when he got too close (a few meters), it suddenly shot off into the ocean… all that was missing was the cloud of ink and it would have been the perfect squid-escape.

For the second dive we went down to a place known as Ko Dok Mai (a 45-minute, 14 meter dive) — it is a towering island of stone (cliffs all the way around), lording over the ocean by something around 50 meters. You dive down the side of these cliffs; and after they enter the water they become the basis for a reef-like environment. There were quite a few sea urchins, though not as many as at Shark Point, and more varied fish — barracuda, parrot fish, grunts, groper, and then scorpion and angel fish again. Living in the little reef were also a fair number of moray eels, which were cool for me to see as I hadn’t yet seen them down under the sea in their habitat. Normally they just sit inside the reef with only a bit of their head visible; so the dive master kept trying to get them to try and bite his finger (they were smaller ones) to draw them out so that we can see, but they didn’t take the bait. We got lucky later, though, and got to see one that was outside of the reef, undulating as he was swimming up it. Very neat.

After diving we returned to the resort, where we sat down and had a meal at the Marriott Cafe, which had fantastic service and wonderful food.  \o/

Updated! Pictures added.
Sorry at the lack of updates. We’ve been crazy busy. Since the last post, we’ve been through (as long as I haven’t forgotten anything):

1. Nara, Japan Done: Nara, on November 9
2. Osaka, Japan Done: Osaka Universal City, on November 10 Osaka Castle, on November 11
   
3. Himeji, Japan Done: Himeji, on November 12
   
4. Hiroshima, Japan Done: Hiroshima, on November 12
5. Fukuoka, Japan Done: Fukuoka, on November 13/14/15
   
6. Flew from Fukuoka, Japan through Tokyo, Japan (said goodbye to Andrew ); through Bangkok, Thailand, and ended up in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
7. Siem Reap/Angkor Wat, Cambodia.
8. Flew from Siem Reap, Cambodia through Bangkok, Thailand, and ended in Phuket, Thailand; where we promptly checked into the JW Marriot Phuket Beach (possibly insert other modifiers here) Club for our 1-week stay at the resort.

I know, we have a lot of updates to do. We basically didn’t have time as we tried to squeeze all the time we could into our last days in Japan and our short stay in Cambodia. Even now (during the 1-week stay at the resort); I won’t be filling in all the blanks. As to why, I have a simple answer for you: swim-up bar with waterfall. What I will try to do is post about today (our first full day at the resort), and will try to stay on top of posting about Phuket, so that it doesn’t build up any more than it already has!

So, today was our first day at the resort. A quick walk along the (magnificent) beach in the morning apprised me of two facts:

1. There is a significant undertow; though it is manageable (this would be what their little yellow flag that is tagged as “Experienced Swimmers Only” refers to, I would bet).
2. The ocean in Phuket is warmer than our hotel pool was in Siem Reap, Cambodia (I think the pool was cooled purposefully though, so take that with a grain of salt).

Angela went further down the beach than I did (I stayed closer to the resort), and ended up finding a lot of sand crabs a ways away from the resort. I’m looking forward to going down myself tomorrow or the next day and checking them out.

After a light breakfast I decided it was time to check out this swim-up bar that I had noticed in the resort map; so Angela and I set off. When it came into sight, I said “Wow! Nice Bar!” and Angela said “Sweet! Nice Waterfall!” She sorta missed the fact that behind the waterfall was a bar. We drank there for a few hours (UHmm… it was time to drink in Canada, I am sure! *cough*), from about 10:00 to Noon. After enough drinks we decided it was time to swim (well, really we were swimming during/between the drinking; but I mean in the ocean), so we all set off for the beach (by this time Mom and Dad had joined us as well) and Mom stayed ashore as the rest of us dove into the waves.

It was a very pleasant swim, very warm water and all that; but I wanted to try the sailboats that the resort provides for the use of their patrons; so we weren’t out very long before returning to shore to the sailboat sign-out place. Shockingly, it turns out that they won’t just hand a sailboat out to just anyone. We had to undergo training first! So we scheduled our training for later in the afternoon and had lunch while we were waiting.

When the time came we were all ready, and after a short (read: 2-minute) lecture about how a sailboat works in general - Hint: travel perpendicular to the wind for best results - we were off! Angela opted to not go first, so it was the trainer and I in the small one-person sailboat, heading out from the beach. He showed me how the ropes and whatnot worked, how to turn, and then nonchallantly told me to take the helm. Was kind of nervous; but I did OK… though I was never able to turn into the wind properly. Turning into the wind is safer (less chance of a capsize) than turning away from the wind, but harder to do, too. Turning away from the wind I can do, but into the wind will take more practice.

Anyway, we played around for a little bit and then headed back into the beach, intending to switch me for Angela. However just at that time the resorts bigger sailboat was beaching to discharge it’s passengers, so the trainer just turned it around and boarded all of us (Angela, Dad, and I) and headed out to the open sea. The bigger sailboat was lots of fun to ride (I never drove it; but it was fun to ride) — it has a larger sail area than the small one-man boats (obviously), and thus goes faster (…and almost capsizes when some crazy sister catches too much wind and even the weight of the passengers can barely keep it more-or-less upright. Not listing any names…). Apparently it’s also more stable (owing to the twinned hulls) than the one-person sailboat; but you’d never know it with the people that were driving it this time.

That drew to a close our sailboat training; but it was just as well as it was clouding up a bit and the wind was really starting to come up, so we headed to the beach and dinner. I had originally planned to go into town to a club that I saw a flyer for; but tonight is apparently the once-weekly all-you-can-eat steak-and-seafood grill-fest, so I cancelled that (will have to do later) in favour of staying at the resort. The dinner was superlative, what more can I say? They had a beautiful ice sculpture by the desserts table…

A little about the resort: it is on the west coast of Phuket, quite a ways from Phuket City. In fact, it is far away from everything — the City is about 40-50 minutes away, driving. This has it’s negatives (difficult shopping, have to put up with resort prices, etc.) but also it’s really big positives (absolutely huge expanse of very nice beach with no-one on it, basically no-one around, no traffic, etc.). The resort itself has been great — service is exquisite, and they’re nice enough to add a 10% service charge to everything so you don’t have to worry about who you need to tip (and by how much). That sounds a little sarcastic; but it isn’t meant to be — in this case, a built-in service charge is much better than having to worry about tipping. For example, all you need to know is your room number; and then charge-back everything to the room and sign for it. If you had to worry about tipping; you might have to carry cash to tip the people that weren’t directly involved in you signing a receipt. There’s a lot of water around — said cash might get wet — say when a big wave hits your sailboat, for example.

The weather in Phuket is pretty nice — about 30-35 degree days, it seems like, (and I already mentioned a very warm ocean)… so no complaints on that account! I want to post pictures of the resort and whatnot (and I wish I had some of us sailboating), but unfortunately can’t right now… tomorrow is diving… and I have a feeling there is a drink out there somewhere with my name on it for tonight.

Some general photos of the resort (some in the day, some at night with the torches on):

nn

After leaving Osaka, our next target was Himeji, to see Himeji castle. It was much better than Osaka castle, in my not-so-humble opinion.

… and when you get to a new castle, what’s the first thing that you do? Play with the fish in the moat, of course!

Seriously. Just start tossing breadcrumbs or something else edible into the water and watch them all appear! Eventually we got enough clustered around that when you tossed a new crumb in, the water would all roil around and fish would actually be forced up out of the water by the crowd as they all fought over it. When we stopped to look around we actually had a number of Japanese people watching as well; so we gave some crumbs to a small child standing nearby and laughed about the fish with the older man to our left.

Of course, this always give birth to the best plan ever, wherein Andrew wanted to get a whole bunch of crackers and slowly make our way around the moat, gathering up all the fish with the promise of food; until we would meet on the opposite side of the castle and have all the fish in the moat there. That would have been crazy, roiling, fish-angry water.

Someday maybe we’ll do it.
The castle itself was quite imposing, viewed from the outside.

… and for a measure of scale, check out this picture of us with the castle.

When we got inside the castle, we were pleasantly surprised. It has not yet been re-built into a modern, office-building-like interior, and remains somewhat antique-looking…

… complete with old-style muskets on weapon racks.

The castle was very interesting, particularly in view of the secret rooms that were all over the place that served the purpose of allowing warriors to spring forth from the walls at strange places and attack invaders. Hidden warrior-cubby-hole sort of things… I want to add some to my house; you never know when they might come in handy.

After the castle itself, we toured the gardens (which are quite nearby, just a few minutes’ walk).

… and then we ran off to catch our train to Hiroshima.