Posting from the top of the sleeping bear dunes

Here is a picture from the top of sleeping bear dunes, facing toward Glen Lake.

Beautiful view, really crappy climb for fat guy like me!

More Camping!
WE are going on a family camping trip, starting Tuesday. The five of us will be tenting it in the primitive section of Leelanau State Park, way up near the tip of the Michigan Lower Peninsula.

This will be my first time in this particular state park, but it looks like our campsite is about 100 ft. from Lake Michigan beach. Should be a great trip.
I am going to try to mobile blog the whole trip form my phone, so it should be interesting!

Pictures from camping

I took a few snaps with my mediocre camera-phone camera on my recent camping trip.

Once per year, I go camping with all of my friends without my wife and kids. My wife does the same with her friends, leaving all the smelly boys behind. We do dumb guys stuff for the entire weekend, smoking cigars, drinking beers, and playing card and role playing games until the wee hours of the night. Some of the other guys fish and canoe, and I catch up on my reading and do some hiking and cloud gathering.

This is the cabin we stayed in. We were at Fort Custer Recreation Area, and we have stayed in much better cabins before. This one was small, run down,and cramped. There was no pedestal grill either, so we did all our cooking in the fire, which went pretty well. My friend Andy is our menu planner/Master Chef, and we had nothing but good eats all weekend. Tuna Steaks, Hobo chicken and burgers, good cigars and beer.







The Fire pit:














The gross Kalamazoo River in our back yard. It looked like mud and smelled like dead fish. Another reason not to return to this particular park.


The little gentleman's room:


Morning over one of the lakes in the Park:


This is the foundation of an old barn the we found while hiking in the woods between two of the old lakes. We guessed the farm was taken by the US Army during WWII, when the government turned the land into Fort Custer. the farm was left fallow, and the government gave the land to the parks Department in the 70's.



If you look you can see my buddy Tom at the base of the silo for scale.
Here is the inside of the silo.

Beautiful day

Today is one of those gorgeous spring days that make me remember why I like living in Michigan. It is about 60 degrees outside, sunny and fantastic. Get outside for a bit today if you can!

Writing, Writing, Writing!

As I have mentioned before, I am a huge fan of Pen and Paper Role Playing Games (RPGs), like Dungeon's and Dragons. I have done a bit of RPG writing before, writing half of the Psibertroopers game with Scott Palter (which sold nearly 1000 copies!). I also did a few small freelance projects here or there, so I can technically call myself a professional writer, but in truth, I am just a wannabe with a blog.

West End Games, the publishers of the D6 System announced a few months ago that they were planning on going open source with D6, which is great news for fledgling game designers like me. what this means is that you can use the D6 rules for your game at no cost, as long as whatever you write can then be used by someone else under the same deal. this arrangement makes for some cool collaborative projects that might not happen any other way.

Unfortunately, West end Games is broke, and not really putting out any new products right now, so it may be a while before these rules actually get put out in their final format. I am working on my own version of the rules, taking out the stuff I don't like and adding things I do, and my efforts can be found here.

hopefully I can get at least a rough draft done in another month or so, but there are no guarantees!

Important Message

I received the email below a few days ago, and I think it is important to get it out to as many places as possible, so I am blogging about it. I saw the same letter on one of my favorite blogs, Boing Boing, this morning as well, so I know the word is getting out.

I subscribed to MP3 Tunes because there was a link to it on my Nokia N800 tablet when I bought it. I sign up for free stuff all the time, but this seems like a genuinely useful service, especially for folks like me with a big music collection and lots of interconnected devices. If you get a chance, check out their site, and maybe sign up for the service.

Dear MP3tunes Customer,

Let me start by saying that as the CEO of MP3tunes I appreciate your support over the last few years. Your suggestions and patience have helped us build the Locker system we have today. We just launched AutoSync that makes managing your music collection easier than ever.

As you may be aware, the major record label EMI has sued MP3tunes, claiming our service is illegal. You can read about the case here. Much is at stake -- if you don't have the right to store your own music online then you won't have the right to store ebooks, videos and other digital products as well. The notion of ownership in the 21st century will evaporate. The idea of ownership is important to me and I want to make sure I have that right and my kids do too.

I would like to ask for your assistance in our battle for personal music ownership. We need your help because we are a small, 15-person company battling an international giant. They would like to make us spend all of our money paying legal bills. Here's what you can do to help:

1) Please upgrade to a Premium account. This week MP3tunes is launching 3 service levels. I hope you will consider signing up for one of the paid levels. This will not only help us pay for the costs of our service (machines, storage and bandwidth) but a portion will go to cover our legal costs in our case with EMI.

2) If you have a chance to talk publicly about our cause on your blog, with friends, reporters or even EMI personnel please do so. MP3tunes is working hard to design a secure personal music service. We don't promote sharing of music in any manner. We want people to legally acquire their music. But once they do, we think it's important that you be able to use it how you want for your personal use. The AmazonMP3 store says: "You may copy, store, transfer and burn the Digital Content only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use." and this is what MP3tunes allows you to do.

You have my commitment that I'll continually battle for your right to store your music online and listen to it anywhere on any device. I hope you'll consider helping MP3tunes in our battle. Thanks.

-- Michael Robertson
CEO
MP3tunes.com