Author: Jason

Company Policy

Random Thoughts

I have stumbled across this on the Internet a few times now, and I decided that I would post it to share with my readers, whoever you may be, and perhaps someone out there can point me toward the origin of this brilliant piece of work, because I can not find it.

Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the other monkeys with cold water.

After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked.

Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they know that’s the way it’s always been done around here.

And that, my friends, is how a company policy begins.

I have found this to be true.

Programmers Are People Too

Gaming

Have you ever had five or six things that you needed to do in your life?  Like perhaps you are in need of (1) Getting a Job, (2) Cleaning Your Garage, (3) Alphabetizing your CD collection, (4) Doing the Laundry, and (5) Calling your parents.  Arguably, of that list, getting a job is probably the most important (although, calling your parents might be at the top of that list depending on how long it has been… so, have you called your parents lately?  No?  I’ll wait…  okay, let’s continue), however, getting a job can be a big process which can be broken down into smaller tasks, and is least likely to be over with quickly.  You might, if this were your list, spend an hour circling ads in the paper, making a few calls and maybe emailing off a couple of resumes, and while the task of getting a job is not complete, you’d likely move on to something else.  Especially if this is not the first day you’ve spent looking for a job.  You might, given these tasks, go sort the CDs for a while, then throw a load of clothes in the wash, piddle around in the garage and come back to the job search later.  Sound about right?

As long as all the tasks were getting worked on at some level, you wouldn’t fault yourself for not spending all your time on the number one top task, nor would you fault anyone else for doing it either… unless it was their job.

It is very common in my daily work that I have a half dozen tasks on my plate.  The most important one might be to build an entire new application, followed by some bug fixes, maybe a new report over there, another field added to this screen, etc.  Just like any other person in their normal lives, when I work, sometimes, if the task is very large, banging my head against it, even if I am making good progress, gets depressing because it is not getting finished.  So, throughout any given work day, I am liable to stop working on the big task and go polish off a smaller one.  It makes me feel good, and makes working on the large lumbering task more bearable.  However, none of the people I’m doing this work for like it.  The people who want the entire new application are upset that I’ve released code with bug fixes, a new report and some screen changes, but no new application.

Being as this is in the Gaming category, how does it relate?  Ever read a patch message to your favorite MMO and found yourself thinking (or saying, because every now and then we all talk to ourselves out loud, and its okay), “Why did they fix all this piddly crap when X feature/class/mechanic is so utterly broken?!?”  The answer is in the preceding paragraph.  No matter how broken something is and how important that feature may be, sometimes a programmer just needs to take a few minutes to fix something easy just to get a victory under his belt for the day.

And believe me, you WANT him to have that victory, because a programmer who gets buried under huge high priority tasks with no end in sight is an unhappy programmer who is looking for another job… and when he finds one, he’ll be replaced with a temporarily happy programmer who doesn’t know the code as well as his predecessor (and he’ll be unhappy and looking for a job soon enough).  Those little victories are what keep the programmers believing that they can and will tackle the larger problems that exist.

Blog Banter: The Box versus the Digital Download

Gaming

Always looking for sources of things to talk about, I’ve joined up with a group of other bloggers to do a monthly blog banter topic where we all post on the same subject.

Welcome, welcome to the 6th installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel! Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

Topic: Digital distribution of games vs. buying physical boxes and discs, which do you prefer and why?

If you had asked me this question years ago, my answer would have been physical boxes with no hesitation, as my closet full of game boxes will attest.  But then again, years ago, digital downloading could be iffy. Downloading a game once from some random website wouldn’t guarantee that you could get the game again later if you needed to.

That’s the main reason I always went for the physical box.  Once I have the box, as long as I don’t lose it, I can install and play that game whenever I want.  Every once in a while, I’ll pull out one of those boxes even now and throw down with an hour or two of Myst or Evil Genius or some other game you may not be able to find in stores anymore.

Of course, many of those games I own boxes for are available on GameTap now, so I don’t need my box, I just need to keep my $59.95 a year subscription active and I can play any of their 1000+ games whenever I want, on any machine I install the GameTap client on.  I’m a proud user of Steam, where I get my occasional fix of Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 (games I don’t own boxes for) among others.  And with my Xbox360, well, I don’t fear Microsoft going out of business anytime soon, so I buy downloadable content through them, which I can always redownload.

But back to that main reason… being able to install and play any time I want.  If EA has their way, that’ll be a thing of the past.  SecuROM is actually going to make me not purchase Spore, a game I have been dying to play, because its some of the most idiotic copy protection I have ever heard about.  Similar problems crept up when Bioshock was released, the copy protection invalidating the game, which could be avoided by either getting the console version or by going through Steam.

I guess in the end, what I am saying it… assuming the source for the digital distribution will stick around, or that I can burn my own copy of the download for safe keeping, I don’t mind not getting a physical box anymore.

Check out these other Blog Banter articles! Living Epic, Silvercublogger, Mahogany Finish, Video Game Sandwich, thoughts and rants, XboxOZ360, Zath!, Delayed Responsibility, Gamer Unit, Hawty McBloggy, Triage Effect.

Get Smart

Reviews

12 out of 13 nots
for missing it… by that much.

I don’t want to mislead you with that little snippet above. This movie didn’t really miss it. It nailed it, but it just wasn’t perfect… and that’s okay.

If you never saw the old TV show, you should. Get Smart was always great, in the same way that Police Squad was great (Police Squad being the TV show that came before the Naked Gun movies). In a world jam packed with awful genre parodies, like the “[blank] Movie” franchise (Scary, Epic, Date… and Meet the Spartans, because really, even though they changed the name format, its the same thing), its nice to see a movie that is genuinely funny and doesn’t rely on jokes that won’t make sense to anyone in five years… okay, I’m being generous… three years.

Get Smart is a funny spy movie, as opposed to being a funny movie about spy movies. Maxwell Smart is the best analyst at Control. So good that even when he passes his field agent exam he isn’t going to be assigned into the field because they can’t afford to lose him. That is, until Control is compromised and covers are blown, and the only way to track down the forces of Kaos is to use an agent no one knows… Maxwell Smart. Accompanied by Agent 99 (who for reasons I won’t spoil is also able to work in the field), they try to learn Kaos’ plans and save the world.

Steve Carell plays the part of Maxwell Smart to perfection. Don Adams would be proud, I think. The rest of the cast is also fantastic, Anne Hathaway, Alan Arkin, Dwayne Johnson, Terence Stamp… just great.

In the end, this is a great comedic film about spies. In my opinion, well worth your movie going dollar.

Fallen Earth Announces They Are “Feature Complete”

Gaming

I have to admit, seeing a game company announce that their game is feature complete while still in the alpha stage gives me a tingly feeling all over. I am tired of games getting into beta and still adding classes and entire sections of game play.

So what does this mean, this “Feature Complete”? In theory, it means that they have implemented some rudimentary form of every game mechanic required to play the game in all the ways they intend the game to be played. The nuts and bolts. If true, it means that now they will begin overhauling each feature looking for bugs, making them more robust, and polishing them until they shine.

Of course, I will believe it when I see it… I really do hope this game turns out well. After talking to these guys at Dragon*Con, I want to see them pull this off, and I want to play it.

Read their announcement yourself.

Seeing Redd

Reviews

Back in March I read a book called The Looking Glass Wars.  I enjoyed it enough to pick up the sequel, Seeing Redd.

We are back in Wonderland, and its been… well, some short period of time since the end of the first book.  The book uses “lunar cycles” to measure time, but its unclear if a lunar cycle in Wonderland is the same as one on Earth, but I suspect it isn’t.  Here on Earth, a lunar cycle means from full moon to full moon (or new moon to new moon, if you wish), which runs about a month.  In Wonderland, I am guessing that its much shorter, perhaps that the author might in fact mean just one day, as is the moon comes up and then the moon goes down.  In some places the book says its been a full lunar cycle, and you can easily imagine a month having gone by, yet in other places when an urgent task is required to be done in two or three lunar cycles… well, would waiting two or three months really make the task urgent?

In any event, the book keeps with that same similar style from the first book where things are said but not explained, which is good that the book isn’t bogged down with explaining exactly what an orb generator or a scorpspitter is, and yet, given the way that I read books, constructing the world in my imagination, without details I’m left to fill in the gaps myself, or just to have gaps.  Filling in the gaps myself often leads me to having to revise my image of something later when a new detail does emerge, which then causes me a little confusion concerning earlier events…

Despite those issues (which might be my issues alone), the book still reads well.  It moves along at a good clip, hits the high parts and delivers a decent punch.  I enjoyed it.

Ten

Site News

In 1998 I was playing Team Fortress with people I’d known and a larger group that had grown from my earliest days “online” dialing in to BBSs. At the time, I was hanging out in IRC chat on the GamesNet servers, mostly in the Disciples of Syrinx room. I had moved back home with my parents at the end of the previous year after successfully (in my mind) living “on my own” for a few years so that I could focus on school, doubling up my classes, and finish my four year degree in six years (maybe I hadn’t been so successful on my own). I spent my free time, and since I wasn’t working there was quite a bit of it, playing games and reading the .plan files of developers. Mostly it was the id software crew, but there were others. Blogging wasn’t so popular back then, but people did have websites, and game developers, especially in the first person shooter arena, kept up with .plan files. With college nearing its end and loving computer games, I had this idea that I would get into the gaming industry. Months later and many unreturned phone calls and rejection letters, I would set aside that dream, but at that moment, I decided to start maintaining my own .plan.

I did it in IRC at first, so the only people who could read it were people who knew to look and only when I was online with my mIRC client. Soon enough I moved it to Geocities. June 17th, 1998 marked my first post on the internet, and because I’m a pack rat and paranoid about computer crashes, I always kept spare copies of everything, so if you want, you can dig through the archives here and actually read everything from the beginning. After Geocities, I moved to my own domain, loadfix.com. If you try to go there now, it redirects to a .de domain that gives back a 403 Forbidden error. A year later I would move on to squadleader.com with dreams of eventually running an online magazine for first person shooters. I never did, and now that domain is a squatter’s hope for cash (a crap website placeholder of links doing nothing but praying someone wants to buy it). I would have kept squadleader but for one, I wasn’t playing shooters anymore after EverQuest took over my life, and the other reason is it turned out I didn’t own it. Sure, I registered it, paid for it, but my hosting company put everything in their name, so when I tried to switch providers, they kept the name. Thus begins the probablynot.com era.

To be perfectly honest, when I put my first ever posting on the internet, I never thought I’d still be doing it ten years later. In fact it didn’t even cross my mind to consider it. In one respect, its like keeping a diary, and now and then I’ll go back and root around through the old posts and laugh at myself, or shake my head, smile, or nod knowingly. However, unlike a diary, its out there for other people to read. There are times I’ve considered going back and deleting some of the old posts. When I migrated from Coranto to WordPress, I had the perfect opportunity to just lose all the old content, or pick and choose what to put back in, but I ended up importing all of it. Good or bad, I wrote it, its me, or at least was me at the time, and as I’ve written before, if you are happy with who you are, you can’t really regret your past because your past has made you who you are.

However, ultimately, my decision to import all the old posts came down to one thing, that I’ve been doing this, emptying my brain onto the Internet since 1998, for me. When people comment, or send emails, about what I’ve put out there, it feels good, but I’ve never done it for that. I always just wanted to put my thoughts down on “paper” but I didn’t want to hide it under my mattress or in a closet or behind other books on the book shelves where no one would ever see it, because maybe, just maybe, my words might affect someone else, or someone’s reading of my words might affect me. Do I sound emo? I think I sound emo…

Anyway… ten years… some times it just kind of blows my mind a little… well… here’s to the next ten years.

Welcome to Town (US) (PvP) (14)

Gaming

If you don’t understand the title, well, I wouldn’t blame you, I just made it up. But the idea behind is has to do with instancing.

One of the best elements of the game Guild Wars is that as long as you and another player are playing in the same expansion, you can play together. When I see games utilize instancing only to produce an infinite number of copies of Random_Dungeon_X or to produce seventeen copies of “town” to keep the populations low and yet they run a dozen or many dozens of world servers, I see it as an opportunity lost.

Where are the MMOs that utilize instancing as a method to eliminate the need for multiple servers? Worlds where everyone lives in the same place, they simply choose how they want to experience it when they leave “safety”. The title of this blog would indicate that you have entered “Town”, the localization is for the US (American English), its a PvP enabled instance, and it is the 14th of its kind because US PvP instances of “Town” are popular.

Of course, a game like WoW that has worked so hard to eliminate zoning except when going into little pocket dungeons and raid zones, this idea wouldn’t really work. And I realize that putting in a UI chunk that deals with switching instances, be it to join friends or escape crowds, might be off putting to some, but I think the idea has merit if only to avoid playing a game only to discover you can’t play with any of the people you meet at work or a party or wherever without someone (or several someones) having to pay to switch servers or start all over again. People might be resistant to it at first, but overall in the longterm I think it would be better for the virtual world of the MMO.

I hope to see it some day in more than just Guild Wars…

The Incredible Hulk

Reviews

11 out of 13 nots.
for never really slowing down and HULK SMASH!!!!

Long ago, there was another Hulk movie. When I heard about it, I was excited, I like the Hulk. I was very sad when I saw it and it was a slow dramatic mess that essentially shat all over most of the source material.

So, when I heard they were making a new Hulk movie and essentially ignoring the other film, I got excited again. And this time, I was not disappointed. While The Incredible Hulk isn’t quite as good as Iron Man, it is an example like Iron Man that Marvel is really taking care to bring their characters to the screen right, and not let go and have someone else make a mess of it.

This time around, we skip the origin, except in a flashback and a parade of news clippings showing suspected sightings of the Hulk over the last five years. Banner is hiding out in Brazil, working on a cure for his illness, and a group of the military, headed up by General Ross, is still looking for him. Banner has been talking to an unknown source who calls himself Mr. Blue, and Mr. Blue thinks he can cure Banner, he just needs the original data on the gamma exposure levels. To get that data, Banner has to go home, but even before he can set out, he’s found and the chase begins.

In the older Hulk film they bent the source material and forced in the Absorbing Man, and it was bad. This time we stick with Ross and in a much more believable way we get introduced to Emil Blonsky, who all the comic fans know becomes the Abomination. Like with Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk is rife with comic facts, characters and bits that will make the fans happy, but nothing that will kill the movie for the casual viewer. They even threw in a number of references to the old TV show… and again, managed to do it without leaving new inductees in the dark about some missed piece of information.

Overall, this was a great way to bring the Hulk to the screen. Well worth the price of admission.

Best TV/Web Cross Promotion Ever

Random Thoughts

Have you ever been watching a TV show and heard a song that you wanted to know what it was or who sang it? Even worse, it wasn’t on the CW so they didn’t tell you at the end and you had to go digging around the Internet hoping that someone else who watched the show knew the songs and put it out there somewhere that Google could find it?

Last week saw the premiere of Swingtown. Its set in the 70’s and is about a couple that moves a few blocks from a cozy middle class neighborhood to a more upscale rich neighborhood across the street from a couple who swings. If the use of ‘swing’ there confuses you, it means to have an open marriage, sleep with other people as well as engage in group sex. The show was okay… nothing really ground breaking, and I didn’t even find their allusions to sex all that graphic or shocking. I’ll probably keep watching it through the summer because there isn’t much else on.

However, the best thing during the broadcast was a little blurb saying “if you want to hear the music from Swingtown again, go to Last.FM” and they gave out this link.

Pure genius. Every single show that has music in it needs to hook up with Last.FM and do this. Simply awesome. I mean, I’ve used that site before, during dinner parties or regular parties or just while I’m working… normally, you pick a band you like and you get to hear them and other bands similar to them. But this, putting together a streaming soundtrack from a TV show… this is truly inspired use of the medium. No more guessing what the song was, just go to the show’s Last.FM page and hear it again.

I repeat… every single show that has music in it needs to hook up with Last.FM and do this.