I've been busy lately.

About one month ago I joined WebMD Health Services as their new VP of Technology. I'm responsible for product development, customer integration, and hosting operations for the private portal business for employers, health plans, and providers. I have an amazing team to work with and great support from the executive management team. We are running fast with no signs of slowing down soon, so there may be limited posting here for a while. Football season is wrapping up today (check out my latest post over on A Football Coach in Sherwood) so hopefully some evenings and weekends will start opening up again for periodic gaming.

My good friend Brian emailed me about a month ago asking about Dungeons and Dragons. His son John started expressing interest in learning the game and Brian wanted some tips and suggestions. Brian had played only once during college 20-25 years ago, and while 4E D&D is relatively easy to learn I think it can be a tough game to bootstrap without a dedicated teacher. I proposed that they come out to Sherwood to join us in a game of Descent. Not quite D&D but a great opportunity to get a feel for this style of game. I also felt this was a game they could pick up on their own and play with 1 or 2 of John's friends.

Jacob and Matthew joined us, and we played the intro scenario for what seems like the fourth or fifth time. In fact, I'm not sure if I've ever played anything but the first scenario. This is a cakewalk for the heroes but Jacob still managed to die twice, adding some fun to the session. John absolutely loved the concept of adding skills to his character, even going back to town to spend 1,000 coins on a new skill card. This is a good sign he'll be a big fan of deeper RPGs.

Ken and I resumed what will hopefully be weekly Wednesday wargaming sessions. We've been playing through the Stalingrad scenarios for Combat Commander and loving it. We played scenario 37 which has a weak Russian force trying to hold out against a superior German force in an urban combat setting. I played the Russians, Ken the Germans.

The default setup and victory conditions has the primary objective for Germans close to the front line - a dividing road near the German setup location. We drew additional objectives that made the two buildings near the rear line worth an extra 14 VPs, which is a huge strategic change in the scenario. Ken was sufficiently aggressive, running up my weaker left flank in an attempt to capture one of the bonus buildings. In short order he was also moving up my right front or the 12 point bonus and there wasn't much I could do with my garrison near their front lines.

Some early time triggers put the screws on Ken pretty hard but he stayed with his plan. He only managed to capture a single objective by the turn 6 trigger that brings in my reinforcements plus an extra squad/LMG for each objective I still hold (4 total). We both felt like this was probably game over for the Germans but Ken persisted and I made at least one tactical error by having my front garrison run for the sewers. I forgot about his hero that could dash across the map at will and this allowed him to capture the building. It then became a race of casualties vs. time, and as you can see from the photo below we were both up against our surrender limits.

Unfortunately for Ken the sudden death time trigger came before he could eliminate another unit and the Russians were the victors.

This is a very well balanced scenario (considering a single play) with loads of tension and a classic attacker/defender posture. The time-based reinforcements force the Germans to act quickly which keeps the pace brisk.

Jacob and I were eager to play Roads and Boats again, so persuaded Matthew to join us for a Sunday afternoon game. I was a bit hesitant, not knowing if Matthew would latch onto a game that can be a bit of a brain burner and would hardly be considered light. Given he enjoyed War of the Ring, I should not have been surprised with his pleasure playing this.

Jacob is very much a natural at planning ahead on both logistics and production. He once again mostly ignored the wonder and focused on working towards coins and stock certificates. I was more aggressive in updating my transporters, getting to 5 wagons fairly quickly followed by a couple of rowboats. Matthew went long on the wonder, earning points in just about every row while learning his way around the production tree.

Matthew and I were fairly convinced that Jacob would be the runaway victor (again), but I researched specialized mines and new mine shafts (after building a "normal" mine so that I could grab some ore) and got a nice steady flow of gold. Jacob worked his way to a stock certificate and would have had a second soon, but Matthew forced the game to end by racing the wonder. I had a nice mix of wonder points, raw gold, and two coins and edged out a narrow victory (204 to 186). Matthew loved the game and this might become a staple in the house.

I started a new blog relaying my football coaching experiences. Enjoy.

While I haven't had much time for gaming lately, the time I have made has been very good. Some meaty games and old gems that don't hit the table very often.

A few weeks ago the boys and I broke out Attack! with the expansion. Besides Nexus Ops (which we play when we want something shorter), Attack! is probably our favorite Ameritrash multi-player conflict game. It has a nice steady build-up, enough resource management to keep it strategic, and a fun but bizarre alternative-history view of WWII. The game must be played with the expansion in our opinion, and we may consider getting the the Attack deluxe expansion at some point.

In the good old days, Jacob and Matthew would go at each other's throats while I sat back and cleaned up the scraps. No more - the boys made a secret alliance against me and knocked me out early. Jacob held off Matthew for the victory. I think the game took about 2-3 hours total.

While Jacob was away at Philmont, Matthew and I were digging for something a bit deeper to play. Matthew has stayed away from wargames heavier than Memoir '44, but given his affinity for Lord of the Rings I thought War of the Ring might be a good next step for him. This is a game I absolutely adore but play too infrequently to quickly start, though this time around the rules came back to me more quickly and I'm starting to see the simplicity of the system. Matthew played the Shadow and I the fellowship.

Matthew was slow going on the military side, taking too long to siege Minas Tirith and get the Shadow armies rolling north. Still, I played fast and loose with the Fellowship, spinning off companions early and running as quickly as possible to Mordor. I pushed things a bit too hard (relative to Matthew's military buildup) and found myself in Mordor with a tad too much corruption to handle. I had to slow down a bit in hopes of getting some cards to help me heal corruption, but the rules force you to slog ahead even if slowly. In the end it came down to the last two tile draws - Matthew managed to draw the only tile in the bag that did not advance the fellowship just as I was sitting on the doorstep of destroying the ring, then on the next tile draw I had only a 1/3 change of surviving and alas I didn't. Score one for Sauron. Matthew loved it and hopefully we'll try again soon.

Last weekend Ken and Eric came over to join Jacob and me in a long overdue game of Roads and Boats. We used one of Sterling Babcock's fine scenarios that allowed the players to get rolling with minimal interaction, but forced some competition at mid-game for the mining resources in the middle.

Jacob is a natural at this game and spanked us all pretty badly. Eric and I both made poor decisions on our mining upgrades which kept us even further back. I quick-played the endgame by building out the wonder but that netted me a solid 4th place. It didn't help that my deep mine yielded three consecutive ore tiles - even one gold would have gained me 3rd place, and three gold 2nd. As I told the group, I love this game even when I finish last. Jacob, Matthew, and I plan to play a three player game this coming Sunday.

For over a year Julie and I discussed various ideas for a special trip to celebrate her 40th birthday (coming up in early August). Our original plan was Italy but in the end we decided on something closer to home. Or rather I decided on something closer to home as I planned this trip as a semi-surprise for her, dropping various hints along the way. The San Juan Islands seemed like a great choice, but when my parents offered to give us some timeshare points I used that to narrow my search and found a great property on Vancouver Island (Pacific Shores). You can find more photos from our adventure in my Flickr photo set.

We drove up the Olympic Peninsula and stopped at a few sites along the way, including a nice beach walk at low tide to see the clam and oyster harvesters on the Hood Canal. Also observed were dozens of beautiful bald eagles.

We spent much of our time hiking the areas around Nanaimo and Nanoose Bay. One of our favorites was the hike to Englishman River Falls.

Julie and I spent a day kayaking off Cedar-by-the-sea with our guide Kim from Wild Heart Adventures.

Our hotel / condo / timeshare way exceeded our expectations, and we found ourselves dining in most nights. This meant picking up fresh fish or steaks from a local grocer, veggies, wine, etc., then strolling out to the point on the bay to cook outdoors and enjoy the sunset. This also led to some great conversations with other visitors.

I think Julie would agree that our favorite day was the 5-6 mile hike around Newcastle Island off Nanaimo. This is provincial park with no residences and some great hiking trails. We timed the visit so that we could walk across to Protection Island and have a beer at the Dinghy Dock pub before taking a ferry back to the mainland.

I've long been a personal finance geek, starting as an early user of Quicken and CheckFree in the early 90s, and culminating in my role as CTO at Corillian where I helped build online banking products for many of the world's largest financial institutions. I left Quicken in favor of Microsoft Money about 5 years ago primarily because Money's budgeting tools made more sense to me and fit with my workflow. Julie and I like to use a zero-base approach that allows us to re-allocate categories mid-month but ruthlessly avoid going over the aggregate outflow budget. For example, we might budget $200 in a month for dining out but decide half-way through that we'd rather use $20 of that bucket to buy a couple of CDs that weren't in the entertainment budget. Money made it easy to allocate between budget categories, a feature that Quicken did not make easy.

Two years ago when I switched to an all-Mac world, I kept Windows (via Parallels) around so that I could run two programs: Microsoft Money and TroopMaster, a specialized application I use for tracking advancement and other records for our Boy Scout troop. It was a hassle to jump into Windows just for budgeting or financial review and the information wasn't easily accessible when not at my home computer. I was ready for a change and my first step was to explore options for the Mac. Quicken for the Mac is largely an afterthought (though QuickBooks Mac is quite nice), and the other niche products had nowhere near the robust capabilities for online integration (pulling my bank data via OFX, for example) or budgeting. Time to look for an online solution.

There are 4 big players out there that provide online financial management with robust account aggregation and budgeting: Yodlee, Mint, Mvelopes, and Wesabe. All are free with the exception of Mvelopes. I've spent a decent amount of time in each of the products and think highly of all of them but Yodlee. Yodlee (disclosure - I have some history with them as they were a competitor of Corillian's and remain a competitor of the companies that bought us, CheckFree and Fiserv) has extremely robust account aggregation but I still do not like their user experience. Mvelopes is nice but the fees are a bit steep for the value offered, especially in comparison with the two great free offerings from Mint and Wesabe.

Before I talk about Mint vs Wesabe, let's turn back the calendar a bit to January 2009. My income was severely cut back as I worked to bring the startup I work at to a solid financial footing as we seek a stronger customer base and funding. Julie and I have always been diligent with our finances but like many couples that see household income grow steadily we had become a bit too tolerant of casual luxury spending. It was time to get serious about cashflow and see how much we could cut back and sacrifice.

We have been Dave Ramsey disciples for many years. We live a largely debt-free life with our only financial liability being our beach vacation house that we own jointly with family. We don't use credit cards, own our personal residence free and clear, and will likely never borrow money again. When Julie and I sat down in January we did a six-month cashflow forecast to ensure that we could live off a very meager income without having to go beyond our emergency fund into investment savings. Some drastic changes were in order given the spending levels we wanted to get to, so we decided to go with an all-cash system for all of our discretionary spending. This was in addition to cutting many recurring spending categories, including delaying or drastically reducing some strategic long-term goals such as retirement and college savings.

Our cash system is the tried-and-true envelope system. Our envelopes are: Groceries, Dining Out, Entertainment, Pet Food, Hair Care, Allowances, School Lunch, Incidentals, Cash for Next Month, and Board Games. We set very aggressive spending levels for each and withdrew cash at the start of the month to fund the envelopes. Julie has always been a frugal grocery shopper, relying primarily on Winco and Costco for food and using common sense to save money on our big staples like milk, cereal, and meats. She took things to another level starting this year, spending a significant amount of time every week scouring for sales, coupons, and ways to multiply the value of both. Surprisingly, the typically higher-priced stores (Safeway, Albertsons, Fred Meyer) became regular destinations for Julie. Julie learned the rhythm of each store and built a targeted strategy for planning her trips and purchasing. She's been able to get our monthly grocery spending to the $500-$600 range with no sacrifice in meal quality. If anything, our eating has been enhanced as she introduces healthier fare with more raw and scratch ingredients. With two (rather large) teenage boys we consume a lot of milk, cereal, fruit, etc.

My board game budget went to zero, meaning we don't directly fund it each month. I only spend what I earn through sales of existing games or other income sources tied to the hobby. We cut the school lunch spending in half and instead give the cash directly to the boys and let them choose if they want to spend it on school lunch or make their own lunch every day. I pretty much stopped eating out for lunch and started brown-bagging it. Dining out became a special occasion for all of us, a surprisingly nice side effect of this behavior change.

Turning back to the Mint vs Wesabe discussion, it was very important that whatever tool I chose easily supported this change in financial tracking and planning. I want my finances mostly on auto-pilot for recurring transactions that flow through my bank accounts, but I need a lot of control over cash tracking. Wesabe wins this battle hands-down as they allow me to manage my supply of cash just like it were a real bank account. This is critical as there are times when we do end up using our debit card for discretionary purposes (ordering online, forgot to put cash in wallet, etc.). Let me give an example of how we make this work - let's walk through something that happened this month.  Wilco's new album was just released and I gots to have me my new Wilco, so I ordered the pre-release CD online at Amazon for about $10.  This comes out of our monthly entertainment budget, which we funded with an ATM withdrawal at the start of the month.

1) I withdraw $380 to fund several cash accounts: Dining Out, Entertainment, etc.. There's also a $3 service charge which I track, though USAA refunds those back to me at the end of every month.

2) I purchase the Wilco album online for $9.99.  This gets allocated against the Entertainment category, so right away I'm $9 over budget because we pre-funded the full $140 for the month with cash.

3) I move $9 from the Entertainment envelope to my "Cash for Next Month" envelope. Note: it helps to keep plenty of $1 bills around to make it easy to do this, especially when paying allowances to the boys.

4) I record a cash transaction in my Wesabe cash account with a $9 credit. This offsets the $9 purchase I made in Amazon and balances the books. Note that the cash balance in my Wesabe account always matches the amount of money you'll find in my "cash for next month" envelope.

I go through a similar process at the end of the month as I clean out the envelopes to feed forward into the next month. I enter credit transactions into the cash account on the last day of the month and move the money to the "cash for next month" envelope. This gives a reasonably accurate view of the actual spending levels for each category each month and helps us understand where we might be able to trim. At times we might steal between categories (e.g., use some Dining Out money to pay for Groceries) but we don't track every penny that flows between the envelopes.

Mint does not support this sort of fine-grain cash tracking transaction - it only allows you to subdivide banking transactions against a cash account. Where Mint really shines is in the wide range of accounts it can aggregate (I think this is largely courtesy of Yodlee) and therefore it gives a much more robust net worth picture. But Wesabe truly gets it done for our process and I'll stick with them as long as it helps my workflow so completely.

Will Julie and I leave the cash model once our income returns to "normal"? Almost certainly not - by seeing how low we can go, we feel freed to be very deliberate about establishing long-range strategic goals for our extra income (trips, luxuries, eventually board games again). Imagine the prospect of having $5,000-$10,000 of free cashflow to work with every month on important goals - we expect to be there again soon.

Jacob got trained up and has started umpiring baseball games. Work has been slow so he's done some free games for the youth recreational league here in Sherwood. He has his first real (paid!) gig next Wednesday. The training was fairly limited - read the national high school rules book and attend a single training day, but his years of playing have given him a solid grounding in the rules.

I can't think of a better job for a young man like Jacob - it requires leadership, technical proficiency, physical fitness, and respect for both youth and adults. Oh, and standing tall in the midst of abrasive conflict!

The baseball seasons starts with a bang this weekend with the Sherwood Federal JBO tournament. Jacob is playing in the senior fed tournament, Matthew the junior fed. Jacob's team had a great start tonight with a 14-2 win over Beaverton, with Jacob going 2-3 with an RBI and run scored. Unfortunately, he didn't score on the pictured play above where he tried to advance on a wild pitch. Mt. Hood in the background - yes, clear skies have returned to Oregon.