I had the pleasure of helping stage the first Oregon Game Project Challenge (ogpc 1.0), a state-wide project and team oriented computer game programming contest. The event was a big success (we think) - you can read the press release issued jointly by TechStart and the Oregon University System.

Chris Sells had some great things to say about the event as a judge and keynote speaker. He did a great job and was very well received by this smart and savvy high school crowd.

Each team spent the day in a mix of activities:

• Visiting with two separate judging panels
• Presenting their project to a group of peer teams
• Observing presentations from computer game industry professionals
• Playing other teams' games in our arcade
• Playing a bit of Rock Band at the end of the day to wind down

I was the head judge and coordinated the recruiting of judges, the rubric for judging, and the final deliberation process (though I recused myself from leading it as Jacob was on a competing team). In the end an outstanding team called Phred from Philomath took the Champion Cup.

We'll be back even stronger next year. We have grand plans to expand in multiple dimensions - stay tuned.

Jacob won the Sherwood middle school chess spelling tournament earlier this year and was given the chance to compete at the county (actually Northwest Oregon) level and he won. This will be his second trip to the state contest, which will be held Labor Day weekend at the state fair. Congrats Jacob!

We've had a great relaxing weekend here at the coast. The weather was sunny, warm, and calm on Friday and we met some Sherwood friends for some tide pool action at Devil's Punchbowl near low tide in the early evening. Not a very "low" low tide, but still we saw plenty of sea stars, fish, crabs, and anemones.

We also had a marathon session of the Czech game Prophecy that I traded for last year. Matthew and Jacob stomped us (Matthew won by collecting 4 artifacts) but we need to try the short game version next time. Jacob and I also played a game of Manoeuvre and had a blast - it was nice to get back to some 2P wargaming with the two of us, something that has been missing in our lives lately. We played the fixed setup with the French and British and I squeezed out an end-of-day victory in a close match. I'm looking forward to exploring this game more - should have nice replayability with the various countries and different card mixes.

The weather in Belgium was very thematic for Bulge historical site visits, but not so nice for some of the activities we were hoping to do. Matthew helped plan the Belgium portion of the trip, and his #1 priority was visiting the Plopsa Coo amusement park near Stavelot. We averaged about 2 inches of snow per day and experienced some severe whiteout conditions while driving from Bastogne to La Roche on our 2nd night. That wouldn't stop us from making the most of the amusement park, however.

Plopsa Coo is a clean, smallish amusement park not unlike the regional parks you'll see in the USA and as good as anything we have in the Pacific Northwest which is surprisingly devoid of thrill ride parks. It is geared toward smaller children but has a few rides to keep bigger kids interested.

Not that the kid rids kept Matthew away. We had to wait quite a while for the roller coaster and log flume to open up as they cleared snow and prepared the rides for safe use. Matthew stayed busy with the evil bunny ride, the slow cars that you can't actually steer, and good old fashioned playground rides with Jacob and Julie. The rest of us tried to stay warm.

We took a few rides on the roller coaster which was most enjoyable because of the snow and beautiful scenery - the ride itself was rather short and not terribly thrilling. The key is that Matthew had a blast and I earned some credits allowing me to spend more time visiting WWII sites.

After finishing at Plopsa around 1pm we made our way into Stavelot to visit the Abbey. The interesting parts of the abbey are surprising - there's a nice English language audio tour of the museum which goes into great detail on the local area history as well as the construction of the abbey. Things get really interesting in the basement where there is an automobile and motorcycle racing museum complete with Sony PS2 and PS3 kiosks that kept us entertained.

The ruins in front of the abbey made for a nice battlefield for a snowball fight for the boys. After visiting a few more Bulge sites we made our way back to La Roche for a bit of rest followed by our last evening meal in town.

We strolled around town looking for some interesting dinner options and ultimately made our way across the Ourthe to eat at La Brasserie Ardennaise. They had a fine selection of beer, wine, and local flavor dishes - highly recommended. Of course David and I had to order our standby favorite Trappistes Rochefort 10.

The picture below is from the bridge just in front of the restaurant with the feudal castle in the background.

This would be our last night in Belgium - next day we head to Reims, France but not without a few more stops in western Belgium.

Our first stop was the Castle of Bouillon near the French border. Fortunately we left our puppy behind, because apparently it is commonplace for the local raptors to fly away with the cuter ones.

Raptors at the castle? Yes indeed! One of the surprises at this outstanding castle was the birds of prey show put on by a local falconer. Even though the production was in French, the demonstrations of owls, hawks, eagles, condors, and falcons was first rate and kept us very entertained.

Our final stop in Belgium was the Orval Abbey, famous for its beer, cheese, and yellow stone ruins and new construction. The weather was spectacular and the boys had a great time playing some hide and seek in the ruins. I also had Matthew take a picture of our group to ensure that people would believe that I actually went on this trip.

We thoroughly enjoyed wandering the ruins for a while and finished our visit at the gift shop where I picked up a 4-pack of beer with an Orval glass.

That's it for Belgium, the highlight of our trip for me especially when you consider the Bulge / WWII sites we were able to visit. That will be the subject of my next few posts, followed by a wrap-up of our visit to Reims and Paris.

I'm going to break my Belgium report into two sections - tourism and Bulge military sites. This is the tourism section!

Our day started very early with a walk from our hotel in Bloomsbury to the St Pancras Eurostar station about 5 blocks away. I purchased the tickets for the six of us back in December and checking in was a breeze at the automated machine. After some breakfast we boarded the train and were on our way to Belgium.

Julie and Matthew kept themselves busy on the train with a few games of Solo Dice.

Our Eurostar ticket was good for a transfer in Brussels to any other Belgium station on a standard intra-Belgium train. Our next stop was Liege to pick up our rental car. We had to wait about 2 hours at the Brussels Midi train station before the transfer, giving me time to get some Euros at the ATM (long line - only one ATM in the station!). This was the same station where I took a train to Amsterdam two years ago.

I was a bit nervous coming to Liege:

• It was Easter Sunday and I knew that many of the rental car stations in the country were closed for the holiday. I had a reservation and was assured online that the station would be open, but still...
• Julie and I had to cab it across town to get the car, then come back to the train station and pick up the rest of the crew

Turns out I had nothing to worry about - the office was open (clearly just for us - I'm certain they were shutting down as soon as we arrived). Unfortunately their one and only nav system was stolen so were going to have to navigate the old fashioned way with a map and navigator. The hardest nav we had was getting back to the train station from the rental office.

We made our way down the German border then cut across to our destination in La Roche en Ardennes. You'll learn more about the drive down when I go into depth on our historical Battle of the Bulge site visits.

Our hotel in La Roche was Le Luxembourg, a quaint hotel / B&B with a fabulous staff. Dinner at the hotel is mandatory on weekends and holidays so we were obliged to join the chef (also the owner) in the dining room. No complaints - the five course meal was fabulous and it was relaxing to just hang out in the hotel after a long day of traveling. Jacob was clearly recovering by dinner time, enjoying his broccoli soup and showing some better spirits.

Our first stop on Monday morning were the Grottes de Hotton, a spectacular cave system with a fine tourism center and guide service. Our tour guide was able to simultaneously conduct the tour in Dutch, French, and English.

The snow was falling steadily by the time we entered the caves, making this a nice retreat from some blustery weather outside. I was very impressed by how deep and extensive the caverns were - not on par with Mammoth or Carlsbad caverns, but dramatic nonetheless.

From Hotton we turned south to explore Luxembourg, getting a great tip in Diekirch to visit the castle in Vianden. We had only planned to visit Clervaux but this was a fortunate turn as Vianden was by far the better choice. The castle sits dramatically perched over the city and valley and offered amazing views from below and above.

We made a brief stop in Clervaux to admire the town and castle there, but there wasn't much to see. It would be worth a visit in the future to see the photography exhibit there, but for those thinking of visiting the area you can stick to Vianden for your castle experience.

We ended our day with a light dinner at the Viking, the restaurant next door to our hotel owned by the same family. The food selection was limited, but the beer selection superb.

Dave and I both agreed on our new favorite beer - Rochefort 10. Fortunately it is available here in Portland at Whole Foods, but cost is a daunting $6-$7 per bottle. A nice luxury to have from time to time.

Speaking of our host, here's a shot of the proprietor and chef from La Roche en Ardennes. I think he likes to come over to the Viking to party after he finishes serving his dinner guests at the hotel.

It should be easier than this. I thought I had a decent Rails installation running on my MacBook Pro but TextMate was giving me some grief when shelling out to execute certain commands (like pulling down the schema for a model).

This worried me - my environment seemed OK, but if TextMate was failing then there's likely some other lurking problem. It took me about 2 hours to unwind everything and get my environment working so that I could see this.

The root cause? I'm not 100% sure, but here are a few hypothesis:

• I had a mixed MacPorts and Leopard install of Ruby and Rails
• I likely had some path issue that I cleaned up, causing gems to not be found like they should
• I had some strange mixtures of legacy and new ports installed that needed some serious work to clean up.

I think the concept of MacPorts is good, but in reality it shouldn't be this hard. My experience with apt-get on Ubuntu was about 100% better.

Oh well, all is good now. I absolutely love the new TextMate Rails 2 bundle.

Some quick thoughts on two games I got to play tonight - Notre Dame (finally!) and Hanging Gardens.

KC, Rita, Ian, Mike and I first played a five player game of Notre Dame, a game I "won" in a secret Santa trade last December but hadn't managed to play yet. I had heard mixed but mostly positive reviews on the game as well as varying reports on play length. We played in a little over an hour after learning and I quite like it. There seem to be multiple paths to victory and enough competition / interaction to keep you on your toes. Balancing the rat and plague problem was a quandary - I think sometimes you just have to take your medicine. The cycling of the cards ensures that you'll have a wide range of options so you can actually strategize a bit, though the timing can interfere with those plans. I think this is a 7-8 rating for me, especially if I can play it in 45 minutes with 3 players.

Hanging Gardens is an interesting puzzle and set collection game where you draft cards with symbols that overlay on your garden. The goal is to get contiguous orthogonal sets of like symbols together that then allow you to claim the tiles you are collecting. Very easy to learn and decent fun, but I have a problem with how many tiles were left at the end of the game when the cards were exhausted. This makes planning very difficult as there are limited sets and for some (like the tiles where there are only 4), the odds seem pretty good that you will only see 2 of the 4 in the game. Not a bad game, but there plenty of other games of this weight that I would play ahead of it.

Day 3 (Saturday) was our last full day in London, and the weather started to turn cold and windy. This would be the trend for the next 5 days or so in the UK and western Europe, with a high likelihood of snow in many of those parts. After a quick pastry breakfast and coffee near our Underground stop, we headed down to the Tower of London to explore the castle and take advantage of the free Yeoman / Beefeater tour.

We arrived early as planned and walked onto the grounds before the crowds started building up (remember, this was the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter) and proceeded directly to the crown jewels. This was probably a good idea as we saw how long the lines must get there when crowded - it was nice to be able to zoom through the switchbacks and get right to the good stuff. Some big diamonds in there, but more impressive was the vast collection of medieval weaponry and armor.

Unfortunately Jacob started turning ill that morning and as the time came to depart for our Beatles walking tour, Julie and Jacob opted to stay behind and explore the torture exhibits a bit more then return to our hotel room.
Dave, Lisa, Matthew and I then raced across town to try and join the London Walks - Beatles In My Life Walk with guide Richard Porter. I've done London Walks twice - once in 1990 as a pub crawl, and now in 2008, and I highly recommend them for the value and experience. We were very fortunate as we arrived at the station 15 minutes late but caught the group just as they were leaving.

We saw a number of great sites, though none were visually recognizable to me other than the final stop at Abbey Road Studios. Of course I took the obligatory photograph. Matthew decided to keep his shoes on.

Our final touring destination of the day was to walk in the Westminster, Buckingham Palace, and Whitehall area to take in some of the famous buildings and pound the pavement a bit.

The weather was getting very blustery by now so on the Whitehall portion of the walk we stopped into a book store with a nice coffee cafe inside and had some giant cappuccinos and hot chocolates along with a much needed foot rest.

We left Jacob in the room for our dinner Saturday evening with Mikael Sheik (of SpielByWeb fame) and his wife Phyllis. We opted once again for Indian food close to home in Bloomsbury. While the food wasn't as good as the night before, the company was outstanding and we enjoyed catching up and learning more about living in London.

We retired early Saturday night to pack and prepare for our early morning Eurostar ride into Belgium.

We are in Seaside, Oregon at the Oregon Scholastic Chess Federation state tournament. The boys are each tied for 1st place after 4 rounds in their respective intermediate divisions. You can follow my photostream to see pictures I'm uploading from the iPhone.

Update: The boys each won their divisions in the state championship!