Electronic maps

Okay, I admit it, I play role-playing games. Perhaps that doesn't have the same stigma it used to, but I'm used to down-playing that aspect of my life, as I'm also a religious person who doesn't feel like explaining to close-minded and misinformed people that D&D is not a satanic game. Especially not the way I play it.

Anyway, I'm the game master for my particular group, which requires a fair amount of preparation. Okay, it doesn't really, but I really, really love the preparation part. I even made a map for the fantasy world in which the game is set. I used to have a remnant of a newsprint roll that I would use, so this is a fairly large map.

The trouble is, as most people know, when you fold and unfold a map too many times it begins to disintegrate at the folds and corners. If I didn't do something my map would fall apart, and it would be difficult at best to make a new one.

Fortunately at the time I was working for a company that had a records retention department that liked me. They had a large-format scanner. They let me scan my map one day and made an image file of it. Unfortunately the map was in pencil, and the scan came out very light. It's hard to read anything very well.

This last weekend I got tired of having a near-useless map file and took my photo editor software (not Photoshop, but a cheaper knock-off) to it. Using the faint lines I traced over them with my software, then cleaned the whole thing up, put location names and various other bits on separate layers that can be turned off when I don't want to see them, and generally made it all look pretty good.

Now I not only don't have to carry around a 3' x 4' sheet of paper (which is an awkward size when you're wanting to view something in one small area), I can use my software to print out maps of any scale, or smaller maps of specific sections of the map. In short, it's going to make my job as game master a little bit easier.

Next time I need a map I'm going to save time and draw it electronically. I admit that some things are difficult to draw with a mouse, but for what I'm doing it works well enough. Anyway, I'll leave you with a sample of the finished product. The original map is 5100x3600, here it's condensed to 10% of that size. Revel in (or fear) my geekiness!

One tent, no instructions

Last year my mother gave us her old tent. She wasn't going to use it anymore, and I figured with three young kids it was only a matter of time before they'd want to go camping. We would need a tent.

This year they wanted to go camping. You must understand that these are kids who freak out if a fly comes near them, so I haven't been eager to introduce them to the wild just yet. So we decided that last night we'd go camping in the back yard first to see how well they'd handle it.

Yesterday morning I dug out the tent to set it up. It's fairly large, a six-person model. The supporting poles were in about twenty pieces. There were no instructions. I'd slept in it maybe once--twenty years ago.

Well, my father shunned instructions, and some of his DNA lives on in me. I decided I could figure it out. The first break came when I realized that the poles were marked with color-coded labels; red, yellow, and blue. I logically deduced that each color group likely represented a single support structure.

From there it got easy, though I went through some trial-and-error in finding out the best sequence for assembly. But I got it up. I don't have pictures, and it's not necessary. It's a fairly standard model, really. The three sets of poles form three inverted U-shapes that attach to the tent itself front, middle, and back.

The tent I wish I had a picture of is the one we used when I was growing up. Now THAT was a tent. My dad, always the inventive penny-pincher, got hold of an old army surplus parachute. With a little sewing help from Mom, he modified that parachute into a tent. It required one long center pole, and then had ropes at four opposing points that could be staked down to pull out the sides. Loops around the edges would be used to stake it down.

We'd lay an old tarp on the ground, roll out the parachute over top of it, stake down the edges, put up the center pole, and then stake down the four corner ropes. There was a slit from the outside to near the center that served as the door, and could be tied shut from inside. When assembled the thing looked like some sort of mutant teepee.

Hang a lantern inside (I think Dad even welded a bracket on the center pole for that very purpose) and the entire thing glowed from within. It was really something. It served us well for many years.

Anyway, our first family camp-out was a success. Next time, however, I plan to spring for sleeping bags and some foam mattresses. We used blankets and quilts, and while we stayed warm enough, it could have been better. And there was a lump that took me awhile to figure out how to sleep around.

But the kids had a ball, and that's what matters. None of them wanted to go inside in the middle of the night. They probably slept better than I did. So who knows. Maybe in another year or two we might try it in the wilderness. Like my brother's back yard.

Oh, and remind me some time to tell you about my engineer brother-in-law and the "Pepto-Bismol Tent". That would be another good one to get pictures of.