On this episode of Radio Active, I discuss my daughter Jordan's sudden desire to learn chess and my approach to teaching her, contemplate the impending arrival of National Novel Writing Month, check out the Geek Dad Podcast and Simian Farmer blog and offer some thoughts on the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

After a few days of working with Open Office's word processor, it was time to turn to the spreadsheet. I don't work with spreadsheets much at home, but I do have a few specialized uses for them. One of those is a campaign manager for my Mutants & Masterminds campaign – I use it to track past, current and future events in the campaign. Each entry has a column for event name, date, weather, type of event (e.g. blog post, crime, super activity) and a brief description.

One of the reasons I bought my MacBook Pro was to get back to digitizing some home video and experimenting with video podcasts for Nuketown. Unfortunately, Apple's iMovie '08 video editing app isn't cooperating.

Every time I hook up my Canon ZR70 up to the MacBook Pro and try to import audio via iMovie '08 (version 7.01, build 506), it crashes after importing one or two minutes of digital video.

It's been a while since my last Game Day column, partly because of a crazy amount of work at home and job, but also because I haven't been gaming as much as I'd like – I've missed two sessions in the last month, and will miss another next month.

Haphazard schedule aside, my Mutants & Masterminds campaign is proceeding nicely. We're up to Issue #3 of Infinity Storm and the heroes are starting to settle into their roles. They've saved the city from a mastermind's weather machine, helped put down a prison riot, and – as of tonight – have earned themselves some much needed downtime.

My first few days on NeoOffice haven't turned up any major problems, but I have encountered a couple of foibles. Most of these are personal preferences, but I think most heavy Word users while find them to be similarly annoying

On this episode of Nuketown Radio Active, I become an uncle again, contemplate a Crisis on Finite Macs, geek out about Halo 3, look ahead to National Novel Writing Month, listen to the Unquiet Desperation podcast and the geeky Secret Agent internet radio station and consider the merits of a geek dad kit bag.

Firing up NeoOffice and using it to write a few quick documents, the first thing I noticed was how slick and Aquafied it was -- it feels like a Mac OS X native application, which is a major advantage over Open-Office-under-X11 approach that I took earlier.

November is coming. And that means so is National Novel Writing Month. In years past, I've watched and read as my friends fought their way through it, some succeeding, some failing, all glorious in the pursuit. I've sat, thought, considered and ultimately come up with one excuse or another not to do it. There's always next year, I told myself, I don't have time for it now.

Now it's next year. And I'm going to do this.

Open Office is a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. Based on Sun's Star Office, Open Office has been around for a number of years, and has proved fairly popular with the geeks, particularly those who dislike being beholden to Microsoft, Apple or any other proprietary software developer. It's the predominant office productivity suite on Linux, and comes bundled with distributions like Ubuntu.

I'm an uncle again. My sister Kristen had a baby boy earlier this week -- Benjamin Francis weighed in at 8 lbs. 8 oz. and measured 22.5" long. That's an inch and a half longer and about 5 oz. heavier then Luke when he was born ... and about 2 lbs. bigger then Ben's sister Sydney. (Ben came 8 days late, Syd 10 days early).