Access Denied!™

A World of Difference...

Welcome to the website of Robert M. Schroeck, gamer, author, husband and a few other things. While there's no small amount of self-promotion and personal ego gratification to be found here, the major reasons for this website are firstly to provide support and information for many of the gameworlds that I have had published or in which I currently run games, and secondly, to host the for-fun writing I do on the side when not writing for pay. I maintain an Amazon.com Associate bookstore on this site for those who are interested in buying my or others' books.

Thank you for visiting my site, and I hope you have fun and find whatever it is you're looking for!

And now, the news...

Access Denied! News

Latest Update: 21 May 2010

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends...

As summer comes rolling in, I find myself still unemployed. I have come tantalizingly, frustratingly close twice in the last few weeks, both times with firms conveniently close and very appealing in culture, although the two were about as opposite of each other as they could be. I made the mistake of beginning to anticipate and even expect success in both cases, and in both cases I was shot down. And in both cases I ended up more than a little depressed afterward.

I'm just coming out of the most recent of these, but I'm not completely there yet.

But there is a little light here. (Well, beyond the fact that I actually made it to second-round interviews twice so far.) In the past 9 months, I've made more than 600 applications for various openings. Between November 2009 and February 2010, I was averaging about one interview per month. But starting in March, I began getting two, three and sometimes four interviews a week. At the moment I don't have any pending interviews, but I'm sure I'll end up with one or more before the end of next week.

Wish me luck.

In the meantime I've been expanding and refining my skills. I've gone back to C# and brushed up on it, I've started learning UML, and I've finally really gotten into ASP.NET. (I ought to learn classic ASP one of these days, as my website host provides it, and I can certainly make use of it for some of the long-term projects I have in mind for the site.) And one of the placement agencies I've interviewed with has just given me access to their rather substantial online training system -- which is just what I need to fill in the holes in my self-taught programming skills.

Sadly, my ability to write remains semiparalyzed. I'm not completely blocked -- I've managed to do some work on both chapter 1 of DW13 and the final chapter of DW5 -- but not enough for me to really say I'm back and working yet. But the week when I finally did sit down' and write for the first time since August was a major thrill.

I guess I should also note that not long after my last update, Mercedes Lackey reversed her stand on fan fiction, making it now possible for me to write Drunkard's Walk I. So that project is back on the table, although to be honest, it's a rather low priority for me now.

In other news... the windstorms that roared over New Jersey in March took out our two biggest trees. The white spruce actually fell on the roof right near the edge, and then rolled off along the side of the house; fortunately it was cushioned by its own branches and did almost no damage. (Photos of the of aftermath can be seen here.) The tree next to it, one of our two cedars, was partially uprooted and leaning noticeably off true -- we had to have a service come in and take it down:

We now have two replacement trees in place -- another white spruce, and a Douglas fir (because we plan on also replacing a fruit tree that we lost a couple years back, which was killed by cedar rust). At this stage of their life cycles, both look like traditional Christmas trees rather than the tall, majestic specimens they replaced. I can only hope we're around long enough to see them start to resemble their predecessors.

Let's see, what else... Oh, right. While I've yet to start on the "dynamic Sidhaisin" project, I have made some other changes to the site since last October. The biggest one (in a feature sense, certainly not in a coding sense) is the addition of an RSS feed to the site. This was at the request of a couple different readers who wrote me; the most recent one actually volunteered to help me set it up, but I got the urge this afternoon to do it, and managed to work it all out on my own with the help of a good tutorial and a feed validator. Now those of you who are new to the site should be aware -- this is not an hourly content change sort of situation. This is more a convenience for folks who want to know semiautomatically when a new DW chapter comes out, or who actually care what I write on the other pages of this site.

There've been other changes, but I'll enumerate them in the "What's New" section below.

Until next time...

What's New on the Site:

Well, as noted above, there's the RSS feed, with the corresponding button on the menu bar. Note that this button gets you the feed for the entire site, not the page or section you're in at the moment you click it. There's not enough content change/turnover on the site to merit subdividing it in any way.

The main DW page has been revised with a proper description of the now-live Drunkard's Walk I.

The DW FAQ, the DW2 Concordance, and the DW5 Concordance have all been updated to reflect the restoration of DW1 to "live" status.

And the Drunkard's Walk Gallery now has a new image -- a photo of a 25mm figure of Doug, courtesy of reader and forum member Dartz-IRL. Thanks, Dartz!

And I think that's everything. See you at the next update.


This page was created on January 14, 1997.
Last modified May 24, 2010.