Winter Break To-Do List

(Semi-gaming relevant) things I need to do over winter break:

• Tabletop:
• I need to resolve something like 4-5 months of ACKS stuff - basically all of fall and winter.  This is likely to be done in small groups over skype throughout break.  Fortunately, I remembered to bring my hex map (though I left my dice at home due to baggage / space constraints...  guess I'll be using perl's RNG).  I need to resolve a bunch of trade for Matt, Alex wants to explore the caverns beneath Fort Camarone, Tom wants to clear some hexes around his tower, and Jared I believe is recruiting a company of cataphracts to hire out to Drew to clear the hexes north and west of Opportunity.  Then in the winter, Alex and Tom will likely be doing research while Matt does more trade and the domained fighters collect income.  Also need to generate some NPC stats and motivations for the coming Witchwar.
• Install a pdf editor (xournal, maybe) and use it to put bookmarks in the ACKS core and Player's Companion pdfs.
• I expect Matt and I will be trying to play Space Hulk at some point.  We'll see how it goes; it's hard to do this properly with digital tabletops because some of the hidden information is either lost or hard to verify.
• I'm curious to take a look back at Wardogs (MJ12's Starmada-based mech game).  I've kind of concluded that BattleTech is probably a bit too...  heavy, and while I don't like some of the components of Wardogs, like the melee subsystem and the huge number of weapon traits, I feel like it would work quite well for an established universe where you're just converting in units.  In particular, I'm curious to try it on 40k's universe.  It could also work well, I think, if the permitted build options were strictly limited; here's a list of available weapons, here's a list of permitted vehicle traits, and you can only design with these things.  A compromise position between the perfect freedom we had with Starmada design and the lack of design in games like 40k.
• Traveller.  I've been following In Like Flynn's Traveller sandbox design project (and reading the Schlock Merc archives), and they've got my Traveller gears turning again.  Might be nothing comes of it, or I may post some material since I don't expect to be able to run Traveller again before everyone goes their separate ways.
• Tim and I split for a copy of Microscope at some point last spring, and it seems like a game that I might be able to get my brother to play while I'm at home.  For bonus points, combine with Traveller.
• Computer games:
• Dwarf Fortress - to elevate the fortress of Treatycaverns, home of the Circumstantial Hatchet, to prominence, preparing it properly for siege after I turn invaders back on.  I finally got splintermind's Dwarf Therapist fork set up properly and it's wonderful, so that should help in this.  I recently discovered that my chief medical dwarf, though a qualified doctor and surgeon, really hates helping other dwarves, and therefore hates his job.  He's since been replaced; while still on call for cases when an actual trained surgeon is necessary, he no longer has to deal with minor ailments on a regular basis, and is much happier as a result.  I would never have noticed something like this without Dwarf Therapist's assistance.
• Get the Steam beta up and running on my xubuntu laptop.  Then, TF2.  Also, filing bug reports.
• Playing with computers: 
• Build and learn to operate an Arch linux VM.  I'm not sure I like where Ubuntu is going with Unity and the shopping lens integration and such (and the network manager memory leak is just awful), but I don't want to jump to Arch without trying it out a bit first.  If the VM tests go well, then I'll maybe think about carving a partition out for it (I'd prefer to run a livedisk test too to make sure it likes my hardware OK, but I'm not sure Arch puts out livedisk trial images).
• Upgrade this laptop to 16 GB of RAM.
• I should probably try to get through a couple more levels of smashthestack, or start playing overthewire instead.  I like how overthewire at least tells you what the levels are before you get to them...
• This ARM assembly course looks informative and potentially useful
• There's this one crashing program that I want to investigate further to see if it's exploitable.  Can't say more, because this might turn into a CTF problem or something.