emptying my brain onto the internet since 1998…
And that isn’t just the title of this blog entry, that’s also the name of this game. Â Space Pirates And Zombies (S.P.A.Z. for short) is a top down shooter. Â It isn’t your traditional zombies, but hey, it looks fun.
Right now you can only buy it from Impulse, but hopefully there will be other options (like Steam!) at a later date.
Powered by Twitter Tools
Not only is “Be Prepared” the Scout Motto, but it’s also a really good idea. Â Or to quote Nathan Muir from Spy Game:
When did Noah build the Ark? Â Before the flood.
When disaster strikes, it is too late to begin planning for disaster. Â So, obviously, the answer is to be prepared.
The CDC agrees, and last week they published Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse, which I have now permanently added as a link over the right hand side.  They aren’t the first to utilize an undead plague to illustrate proper planning.  A group called the Zombie Squad has been doing it for some time.  The main idea being, if you are prepared for zombies, you are prepared for anything.
While the CDC article and the materials provided by the Zombie Squad are good, the key element to disaster preparedness to understand is that you are not a priority for anyone else, and that includes the government. Â In the event of any disaster you should be able to survive on your own for at least 72 hours. Â That’s three days.
Let’s just say, for example, a hurricane comes tearing through your area. Â The first job of the government is not to rush in and rescue survivors. Â What would it do with them? Â No, the first job is to set up hospitals and aid stations so that survivors who can come to them can be taken care of. Â They will work on re-establishing communications and power, and only once they’ve gotten themselves firmly dug in will they begin ranging out to find stranded survivors. Â If they ran out and got people first they’d simply be dumping them all into an unprepared cluster without power, communications or medical treatment. Â Not to mention that if they rush in they could be putting themselves in great danger. Â They are “slow” for a reason, and that is because when they get to you, you will be saved, not just temporarily reprieved.
Even more than that, however, is that by being able to help yourself, you free up resources for people who cannot help themselves. Â If you have food, water and shelter for three or more days, then the rescuers can leave you alone and spend their time finding people who have been injured or are trapped or who didn’t plan ahead and have no food or water. Â By being prepared, not only are you helping yourself but you are indirectly helping others.
The best thing about being prepared is that it doesn’t cost very much. Â A few dollars and a little time will put you leagues ahead of those who don’t. Â You probably have many of the things you’ll need in your house already, and if you don’t a quick trip to Wal-Mart will solve that. Â Then you just need to pick rally points. Â Your home, just outside your home, miles away, states away. Â Make sure everyone knows where to go and how to reach each other. Â Just like that, you are better off than you were before.
It’s so easy that there is no excuse to not be prepared. Â If you aren’t, do it now. Â Do it within the next week. Â Pick a day and get it done. Â Because after the zombies come, it’ll be too late to prepare.
Powered by Twitter Tools
One thing that has been increasingly difficult over the years as there has become more focus on metrics for measuring call center success is actually getting help. Â Too many companies appear to have a policy of denying responsibility first, pushing the problem off on someone else, and only later doing any work once someone else has definitively proven that the problem is theirs to solve.
In my current job, I deal with a lot of phone companies.  From AT&T all the way down to podunk local cable companies branching out into VOIP.  Our company is an answering service, and whenever someone calls us with a problem, we take ownership of it, work out all the details in an effort to either a) find and resolve the problem, or b) conclusively prove that the problem isn’t our problem and direct our customers to the right place to resolve their issue.  As an answering service, the one thing we fundamentally depend on is calls being forwarded from our customer’s location to our servers.  Once we get the call, we can do our magic and answer the phone properly and perform all the duties they pay us for.  If we are getting the call and something isn’t going right, we work to resolve the problem.  If we aren’t getting the call… well, there is only so much we can do.
What we don’t do is just shove people off, tell them to call someone else, and leave it at that. Â No. Â Even when we are certain that the problem isn’t ours, we walk the customer through some simple tests and see what results we get. Â Ninety-nine times out of a hundred (probably more, but I don’t want to get into large numbers or fractions) the problem is with their phone company. Â (Half of the remaining times the problem is with their physical phones and the other half it is with us or our phone service provider.) Â Either the phone company isn’t forwarding to us, they are forwarding to the wrong number, or they are forwarding to us but their service lacks the basic call data that most “real” phone companies send us and we are unable to process the call properly. Â For the third option, we have a simple solution, takes 5 minutes on our end to resolve and then it’s up to their phone company to change the forwarding number – which should be another 5 minutes, but can often take 3 business days. Â The first two options, however, is where the fight begins.
We do our job, then we say, “The problem is [insert exact problem here]. Please call your phone company and tell them [insert solution here]. You can have them conference with us if they don’t understand and we can get it sorted out.” Â They thank us and then call their phone company who more often than not tell them, “Our stuff works fine, call your answering service and have them fix it.” Â It usually takes about five rounds of this before the customer starts yelling at us. Â Why us? Â Because for some reason people trust the phone company. Â Even when it’s a podunk operation serving the people of Greater Backwater with their fine assortment of tin cans and string, they trust the phone company as a utility and distrust us as some sort of money-grubbing for profit evil business.
Eventually, we get a conference call going and I get to explain to the phone company tech how to do his job. Â The worst part is, when I’m doing this, I can hear the contempt in their voice. Â They know how to do this, they don’t need me to explain it, but they don’t want to do it. Â They want someone else to fix it without involving them.
And the phone companies aren’t alone here. Â I run into it everywhere.
It really irritates me because I would never run a business that way. Â Never. Â Your customers pay for service, you should give them the best service and support you can give. Â Of course, the scary though being that perhaps this half-assed responsibility shirking service is the best they can give…
Lately I’ve been getting a bit of traffic on the site, mostly because of the Urban Dead post I made over 3 years ago. Â So, I decided to take another look at the game… which lasted about ten minutes before I remembered exactly why I left.
The main crux of that old post, and the reason I quit the game, and the reason my return was so brief is that I have no desire to play a zombie. Â On the whole, I tend to find stories about zombies to be boring. Â Stories about survivors in a world of zombies on the other hand are awesome. Â Even when the survivors don’t win and they all die, because a good zombie story is about humans, and what we will do to and for each other to survive.
Imagine this: you are playing a game where you are a cop hunting down rapists. Â You find clues, perform interviews, gather evidence and eventually, if you are lucky, you get to shoot them. Â Now imagine if in this game, when you fail to catch a rapist you are forced to be a rapist until you can be turned back into a cop. Â Totally unappealing, right? Â I mean, I hope that is unappealing, because if you want to play a rapist in a video game you need to stop reading and seek help. Â Now.
I don’t want to be a zombie. Â I don’t want to eat people. That game just isn’t fun for me at all to play.
What would make Urban Dead worth playing for me?
First, a simple “reset” button. Â When I die, rather than be a zombie, I’d like to be able to just start over without having to create a new account. Â I don’t mind losing experience and skills or having to wait a period of days, I just don’t want to be undead.
Second, a world reset event. Â If all the world is undead, if no survivors remain, wipe the slate clean and start over. Â If you let people pick zombie or survivor from the start, had levels and skills with the personal reset button causing some skill loss and a waiting period (24 to 72 hours), then you create a true “us versus them” style of PvP, and at that point you can define a win condition. Â If all the survivors are dead or all the zombies are dead, the server declares that side the winner and the entire game resets. Â When the world resets, everyone starts off human, but people who pick the zombie side start infected and in X days they’ll all die and be able to stand up as zombies.
I think that would be a great game.
People who follow my Twitter or are my friend on Facebook might have noticed my daily Insanity workout posting has stopped. Â This is because I stopped doing it. Â Not just the posting, but the workout. Â Here’s why…
I love the workout. Â It’s great. Â And in the future I want to do it again. Â I didn’t hurt myself, which a few people kept telling me to watch out for. Â My knees are fine. Â My back is fine. Â My arms are fine. Â However, my lungs may not be. Â Or maybe it’s my sinuses. Â For some time now, since last fall, I’ve been having issues with feeling like there is something stuck in the back of my throat. Â I cough and hack and it doesn’t clear up. Â I drink water and OJ, I use cough drops and other medications, but relief is only temporary. Â I’ve been to a doctor and they believe it is likely allergy related, but allergy medications don’t seem to be having any effect. Â One thing is clear though, the more I did the Insanity workout the worse it got.
So for the time being I am back to my less strenuous workouts of push ups, sit ups, dips, squats and walking. Â And I’m also hitting up the doctor again to see if we can find another way to proceed, because, frankly, I’m really sick and tired of feeling like this.
Powered by Twitter Tools
Once upon a time, I worked for a company that put out a mandate of updating our disaster recovery plans. Â Seeing as how most of the company didn’t have them, it really meant creating disaster recovery plans. Â Due to a confluence of events, I happened to be the senior guy in our department who wasn’t a manager, and so it fell to me to craft our plans.
As with any good company, we did have some preparations in place even if we didn’t have a formal plan. Â We had an off site backup data center which we could switch over to should a service at the primary site go offline. Â And in that site we had an approximate copy of our primary site. Â Approximate in that the intention of the backup site was to limp the company along until the primary site could be restored, not in that the backup could become the new primary. Â So where the primary site had 3 servers doing a task, the backup site had 1, enough to do the job but not enough to do it without frustration.
So there began a series of meetings between departments as we began updating and creating our recovery plans, budgets were outlined and all the ducks were put in a row. Â In one of these meetings, I noticed a flaw in one of the other department’s plans. Â I brought it up, but since I’d only been there a year and was dealing with people who’d been with the company for 5, 10, even 25 years, I was ignored. Â I was told, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Â To that end, I decided to be sure I was right. Â I began researching the other plans and looking for flaws.
My own department’s plan was simple: money.  We needed to spend the money to duplicate our server functions.  I called the companies we licensed software from and got the okay and licenses to maintain a fail-over site without spending any more money on licenses.  I wrote up hardware orders so that where we had 3 servers doing a task at the primary location we would have 3 servers waiting to take over if the primary failed.  My plan done, I had plenty of time to look at other people’s work.  So I did, and I made a nuisance of myself, sending emails and showing up for meetings I wasn’t invited to in an effort to actually make our company’s disaster recovery capable of recovery.  Eventually, I got told to stop.  The message was clear.  I was to focus on my own plan and leave everyone else alone.
I dove back into my disaster recovery plan. Â You see, because of the flaws in the other plans, my original plan wouldn’t work. Â It had to be redone. Â I went to my boss and made one request. Â On presentation day, I wanted to go last.
The day came to show off our new plans. Â I sat in the back and waited through each department. Â One by one they went to the podium and showed charts and laid out plans that illustrated they were well on their way to being ready, each department patting themselves on the back. Â Finally, it was my turn. Â I got up and started handing out my plan. Â It was very short. Â A cover sheet and then just two pieces of paper beneath that. Â As I made my way through the room people began muttering to each other. Â I got to the podium and said, “If you will turn to page one of the packet I’ve handed out you will clearly see the full extent of my disaster recovery plan.”
It was a copy of my resume.
“If the primary data center were to go offline, I would, in reaction to this disaster, begin sending out copies of my resume in an effort to find another job, because I certainly wouldn’t want to work here anymore.” Â I could see my boss turning red with rage. Â I could also see the managers for other departments shooting dirty looks at me. Â Then I opened up my PowerPoint presentation. Â I quickly showed the single page of my real disaster recovery plan: buy servers, install software, use extra license keys I’d already obtained. Â Then I showed how my plan would still fail due to a flaw in Department X’s plan. Â Then I showed that without fixing another flaw in Department Y’s plan, Departments A, B and C would fail. Â And then I showed how Department M had overlooked a critical piece of hardware for which there was no backup and rendered everyone moot because the only working mainframe terminal in the backup site would be the one hooked directly to the mainframe. Â Their plan actually had them unhooking a piece of equipment, loading it on a truck, and driving it nearly two thousand miles to the backup site, rather than actually purchasing a duplicate – probably because it was extremely expensive. Â “So, as you can clearly see, my only reasonable course of action – since I was instructed not to involve myself in the affairs of other departments – is to find another job.”
The fallout from that meeting was huge. Â First, I got yelled at. Â Then, I got apologized to as they discovered I was right. Â Eventually, new plans were drawn up and big money was spent, but our recovery plan was actually capable of recovering from disaster. Â To date, that company has not had a disaster from which recovery was needed, but that’s not the point. Â The point is that each and every department concerned themselves only with their own particular areas and no one had been assigned the task of looking at the places where they relied on another department. Â Each one was happy to be able to say “We have a back up for our functions” and didn’t bother to examine if slot where their tab was supposed to insert was being covered, they just assumed it was someone else’s responsibility and it would be handled.
Since then, I’ve always tried to make sure I keep an eye on the big picture when I do things. Â And I try to be open to suggestions and/or criticism from others on the off-chance that I’ve missed something big because I’m too close to it. Â Outside that, there is no point to this story other than I just like to share it.