Alex Lockhart

Some years back while I was still in college my first internship came to an end. Although I had been programming from when I was a young teenager, this internship had brought me to web development. At this point I was still quite like a traveller without a map. I had some idea of what was possible, but hardly even knew enough to get started with anything. I had some ideas around a website that I wanted to make but no idea of what technologies to use. At that point my only real experience was using in-house software that I no longer could use.
From 0 to 60 Starting with a google search, and with all the passion in the world, I began ill fated attempts to utilize some then-modern JavaScript libraries and some not so modern attempts on how to serve the website (full stack frameworks, Platform as a Service, Amazon Web Services, etc... were not in my vocabulary at that point).

It was a bit of a crazy journey from there both personally but also professionally. I went from internship to inter…

Da'man, looking at the slain, realizes who they are. He slowly backs out of the room, not wanting to further incite hostilities with the barbarian tribesmen, "We came for a lockbox, a lockbox!".
We came for OgmandGlenn and Jim exchange self-confident smirks, watching him leave. Looking around they decide to take the south door and continue their search for Ogmand. The passageway behind the door leads to what is evidently a storage room. Many barrels cover another door to the left, with more barrels stacked up on the other walls of the room.

They knock over a few barrels, hoping to find something good stored up (they did find dried meats, if dried meet stored in old barrels in a wet and abandoned mine is your thing). More notably they found enormous, terrifying, gargantuan, evil... rats!
Monstrous Beasts Actually they were just rats. No like normal rats. Like just rat-like rats. You know the ones that scurry away unless cornered? Yeah those.

Jim, confident that his barbaria…

Today I looked at my calendar and saw that I had taken this Friday off. A few weeks back I decided that I needed to start using some of my PTO while summer was still around and go on some family trips. Shuffling through my memory I realized that the Newport Aquarium was on our list of places to go, so I began to make plans. Starting with Google Notes I began copy and pasting links and gathering information. My habit is to over organize, probably as a way to relieve stress or possibly just as an artifact of my college days.
Exploring our optionsMy virtual journey through Cincinnati only started with the Aquarium, it led to many other places (some locations with tasty food) but the two most notable is the East Fork state park and the Loveland castle. We have been wanting to go on some primitive camping trips, and I figured that this would be a perfect opportunity to do so. The weekend plan was coming together at this point, first the aquarium on Friday, then we'll stay at East Fork…

A few months back I hit up some friends of mine to try to wrangle them into playing some Hackmaster. I had recently looked into using the online roleplaying tool called roll20 and it seemed like a good fit for us. We had done a lot of 4e Dungeons and Dragons back in high school, but now most of us are in our mid 20s and either have busy lives (wife, kid, church, work for me) and / or have moved out of our hometown. In any event we did end up getting to try out Hackmaster on roll20... and so, here is the tale of Glenn, Jim, and Da'man...
An unlikely meeting The sun was gleaming outside, but Glenn, Jim and Da'man were in the dark of the inn. These three met for the first time on this summer day in this dark smokey inn. A tall and bulky middle aged woman approached and began to recall the recent events of her and her husband, who is the local butcher. She said an old friend came to their shop and was acting very rude... "All of a sudden", she continues, "he pushes m…