Movie Round-Up: August 6th, 2010

Step Up 3-D:

If you are inclined to see a movie about dancing, you could probably do worse than this.  I mean, all of them – to me – are kinda hokey, but if handled right the 3D could actually add a nice bit of depth to the action.  I wouldn’t spend $13 on it myself, but it might be worth it to others.

The Other Guys:

If not for Will Ferrell, I’d be guaranteed to see this movie this weekend.  The plot sounds good, and I like every other actor in the film.  Even Will Ferrell isn’t always bad – I loved him in Stranger Than Fiction – but from the preview it seems he’s playing this in the usual “look at me and be embarrassed by my actions” comedy.  Likely, this is due to Adam McKay, who is responsible for all of Will Ferrell’s worst work, in my opinion.  I’ll surely catch this on Netflix, and I’m sure this will be huge for Will’s usual fans, but I wouldn’t spend my $10 to see this one at the theater.

Meeting Fu

When it comes to business, one of the greatest pains are the glut of meetings the average large corporation insists on having. As a programmer, I have come to the point where I estimate any project at least three times the amount of hours I actually need to do it, in part to leave room for mistakes and redesigns, but mostly to cover the seemingly endless meetings the client will wish to have.

The worst offender of wasted time is the Status Meeting with the client. Now, Status Meetings with your manager or with other team members can be quite productive, but with the client its just because they want to see work being done. The first problem is that not all work can be seen by the client. If the code I have worked on has made part of the program function better, or differently behind the scenes, then there is no screen I can show the client to say “Look what I did”. This results in two behaviors:

1) The stack of paper. When a client insists on Status Meetings being face to face, I cannot go to the meeting empty handed. Despite the fact that my job as a programmer is almost entirely paperless, I have a stack of paper in a drawer of my desk that contains print outs of sections of code (from my personal web page), spreadsheets (of comic books and a sample timesheet I made for a friend), manuals (for my universal remote among other things), and a complete guide to Teradata specific query formats. Thrown on top will often be one or two emails printed that concern the project from the client I am meeting with, and two pads of paper, one with a task list (a huge TO DO scrawled at the top) with items crossed out and one with various ramblings and scribblings. I take all this stack of well thumbed paper with me to the meeting, and then periodically I will shuffle through it before pulling out a random piece of paper and then either agreeing or disagreeing with the client.

2) Useless screen modifications. During the project planning stages, I will suggest that certain changes get made to the layout of the screens, more often the initial design of the screens is done UOP (Ugly On Purpose) so that they can be fixed later. Clients absolutely love to see things move around the screen to new places, especially if they believe it is their personal input that is resulting in the changes (one item may clearly belong on the left side of the screen, but I will place it on the right and try to get the client to suggest we move it to the left). All this designing and redesigning pages wastes time both in and out of meetings.

The best bet, however, when dealing with meetings is to take extra care when planning them.

Step one, if your company uses Outlook to schedule meetings make sure than any time you don’t want there to be a meeting, you have something scheduled already. For example, from 11:30 am to 12:30 pm every day, I eat lunch, and to avoid people (especially people in other time zones) from scheduling meetings during my lunch, I have a meeting scheduled every day called “Provision Processing” (Food Eating) and it is attended by a few random people who also wish to eat lunch at the same time I do.

The next step is to never schedule a meeting on a day where everyone is open, specifically the client. Try to find a day where they already have five hours of meetings planned. Your best bet is to look for a day when they look all booked up except for an hour or hour and a half around noon. Since you took my advice on Step One, your lunch is already blocked, but that gap is probably where they plan to have lunch. Schedule it then. If it does happen to fall into their lunch, the meeting is likely to run quick since they want to get out of there. Basically, anything you can do to make the client initiate shortening the meeting is great.

If all else fails, call in sick. Sore throat, take my wife/kid/father/dog to the doctor. Specificity is not your friend, stay generic when possible but if you have to give details, make and keep a list so you can remember what fictitious ailments you have assigned to your family members. Never ever make it serious though. If you ever fib your way into Get Well cards, you’ve gone too far.

Of course, none of this applies if you actually have stuff to show the client. The honest truth is always the best policy when its good news. All this other stuff is just to avoid having to explain to the client that they are honestly clueless. You might also get extremely lucky and have a client who understands and some weeks is willing to simply accept “Work is progressing and is on track, but there is nothing to show you this week.” In which case, ignore everything I said.

Except the thing about scheduling a meeting for your lunch.

A Tiny First Step

In an effort to move forward on my little game idea, I’ve downloaded (once again) the tools from Multiverse to see if I can make heads or tails of building my own game world. I make no promises, of course, but any motion is good motion at this point.

Bring on the Zombies.

One Step Closer

The 360 takes another step toward closing the Console-PC gap with its upcoming release. Check out the details over at gamerawr.

The biggest thing to me, and the step I’m saying they are taking, is the addition of the keyboard. Frankly, voice communication has only come so far, and for games supporting multiple chat channels, like MMOs, voice is severely limited. Some games just need text, and without a physical keyboard its just too hard to do. If you don’t believe me, trying using virtual keyboards, or even your 10-key phone pad to write long messages. There is a reason people invented text message short hand. (And deep in my heart of hearts, I hope this goes toward the erradication of needless short hand.)

Should this take off as I expect it to, we could be seeing the beginning of the end of PCs as a gaming platform. Though some might think this is great, its not entirely all roses. How do indie game devs break into the console? Maybe Microsoft could start offering a program to burn viable 360 discs so that indie games could be run… but I don’t really see that happening because it opens alot of doors to piracy. Also, if game modding continues to be popular, consoles do not exactly support making mods, at least not modeling and creating textures. As, of course at this time I don’t believe Microsoft supports external game servers… the PS3 claims it will though (or will support paid hosting of game servers).

In any event, the 360 is adding something new that may have an effect on the industry as a whole. Time will tell…

13 March 2001

The First Step
I did something good today. Something hard.
One of the toughest things I have found in life to do is to take the first step toward anything. The first step is the most painful, and the reason people generally avoid taking them. It is change. Leaving the comfort of what is and stepping toward unfamiliar ground.
I cleaned my bathroom.
Yeah, laugh. Go on.
Now let me explain.
I used to live in a damn near immaculate apartment. I have for quite a while. My mother was always shocked considering the number of years I refused to clean my room. But the first time I moved out on my own, it was a, pun intended, clean slate. I started off putting things away, vacuuming regularly, and so on. And I had a roommate that was also fairly clean. My roommate’s cleanliness, however, turned out to be tied directly to his mood. When we moved to the next apartment, he changed jobs and stopped seeing the girl that he was, and he stopped cleaning. Happy.. clean. Unhappy.. not clean. But it was okay as there was me and our third who kept this tidy. Then I moved back home. My parents had a new house that I had never lived in. I had one room, and I felt like a guest. So I moved out again with a friend who bought a house. It was clean, but he preferred to have a “cleaning day” once a month instead of cleaning along the way. It was his house, so I went along with it. Then decided to get my own place. Ahhh… Freedom. 🙂 This place I cleaned, kept my own schedule, and it was good. Of course, time came that I decided I needed more money, so I moved and took on two roommates. We are slobs now. Well, not totally. We clean enough so that its not filth, but there are stack of books, boxed sitting around, and more.
But today I took the first step, and cleaned the bathroom.
See, the trick I have found is that often it looks more daunting than it is because you look at “cleaning the apartment”, when its actually more managable if you look at “cleaing the bathroom”, “cleaning the living room”, “cleaning the bedroom”, and so on. Making the large task smaller, and less painful steps to take.
Baby steps.