Tag: work

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.

The Best of Both Worlds

Gaming

In most fantasy based MMOs these days (and even in most non-fantasy based ones), there are only three functions a player performs at the root: take/absorb damage, deal damage, heal damage.  Most games also usually have one class that is designed to exclusively do one of those tasks.  A warrior tanks, a cleric heals, a wizard or rogue does damage.  Then we introduce the hybrids and controversy ensues.

In real life, at a real job, it is perfectly respectable to have people who specialize in small skill sets working alongside people who have two or three lesser specialties, not to the depth or quality of the single set specialist.  I’ve encountered this in my own life, worked with a guy who was aces at building databases and understanding database structure however his every attempt to ever do user interface work not only looked horrible but failed to function.  I’ve also worked with people who can build the most beautiful web pages but couldn’t properly lay out a database design to save their lives.  Personally, I live somewhere in the middle, I generally do all of programming work from UI to database with a decent degree of competency.  I’m not the best at any of it, but I do all of it well enough.  Usually in a work environment, its best to have a team built mostly of specialists with one or more generalists to support everyone else and to translate and transition work between the specialists.  See, when the UI guru and the DB savant get into a knock down drag out over design, I’m the guy who knows enough about both to be able to talk to both of them and make them see that they are actually agreeing with each other, but using different terms, or to make simple suggestions for both sides to bring them to a point where the work can get done.

In game design, this is where the hybrid should be.  He should be a mix of tanking, healing and damage dealing, any two or all three, to various levels but never as good as the single focus classes.  Hybrids should also be rare, and largely confined to group settings, because the whole point of the hybrid is that he supports other classes in doing their work by picking up slack or boosting just a little.  The problem, of course, is that hybrids are often more dynamic, by design, than the single focus classes, and so they attract more players.  While many people are content to be a specialist in real life, in gaming they want to be able to do everything, on one character.  So you end up with a bunch of people playing Paladins because they want to tank and heal, but then they complain when they do neither of them as well as warriors or priests.

So, what’s the solution?  Is there one?  Does it need one?

I’ve got no answer to those questions… but maybe other people do, and I would love to hear them.

Seeing The Light

Random Thoughts

It isn’t often I take the time to mention the passing of individuals on this website.  My mother, of course… Stanley Kubrick, because I loved so many of his films… Pope John Paul II… Christopher Reeve, because he was, in so many ways, Superman…

I spent most of the morning heads down on some work, barely noticing the world at all, but a few moments ago I broke away and opened a browser to CNN to get a peek at what was going on with the rest of the planet.  Amid the usual political posturing and Middle East happenings, I find out that Jeff Healey died.

In 1988 I didn’t have a CD player yet, only this tape playing monstrous boom box.  That Christmas, one of my gifts was The Jeff Healey Band’s See The Light.  I must have played it a thousand times.  And while my first car didn’t have a tape deck, my second car in 1992 did, See The Light became one of the treasured few that would be played until it broke.  By then I had a CD player for home and I rushed out and bought it, and I’ve had it ever since.

I wouldn’t say that JHB was one of my favorite bands, I only own one other album by them, but they were a band I would never turn away from if the song came on the radio.  But See The Light has always held a special place for me, and it always manages to find its way into my play lists and my CD rotations.  If I feel like bringing down a night of karaoke or serenading my wife or dancing one last slow song before hitting the road, Angel Eyes from that album is the song I most often choose.  Jeff’s music has been and will forever be a part of the soundtrack that plays in my head as my life unfolds around me.

Thank you, Jeff.  You will be missed.

A Book a Week

Random Thoughts

Some people are a little crazy… other people are freakin’ nuts! This time Kevin may be falling into the latter.

The idea is to read 52 books in 52 weeks, a book a week for a year. And you know, its not really that the idea is all that outlandish. I mean, when I was riding downtown every work day and spending two or three hours on the bus between home and work and back again, I was probably on that pace. Of course, I work from home now pretty much nine days out of ten, and reading time has been given over to sleep and game time. But maybe I need something like this to give me a gentle kick in the butt.

I won’t start now though. I’ll wait until January and start the year fresh. Likely I’m also going to choose to do 26 books in 52 weeks, a book every two weeks, because I know that unless I throw in some hundred pagers like the Hitchhiker’s Guide, I’m not likely to do it. And I know myself too well. If I fall behind a few weeks, I’ll give up.

So, January 1st, I’ll start my new reading regiment. We’ll see how it works out.

Last Blood

Reviews

When you think about zombies as a genre, movies and books and whatnot, the truth is that zombies are rarely the protagonist or antagonist. In truth, zombies are often a setting, a world that happens around and heightens the action, a dam that eventually breaks, but the story is usually about survival, the people surviving it, and what they do to each other. From instance to instance, the differences lay mostly in the people, though sometimes in the zombies (largely in how they came to be and how fast they can move and how well they can think).

So, when I come across something that is really unique, I just have to share it.

Last Blood is an online comic book being released a page at a time, usually every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The unique twist on this is that the world has fallen to the zombies, only a few collections of humans remain and it isn’t looking good for them, and that’s when the vampires show up. Vampires need blood to live, and the zombies are killing all the humans, so the vampires need to save the humans so that they themselves don’t run out of blood to live on.

The idea is excellent, and new to me (though it may have been done before somewhere). Sometimes I find the artwork to be a little messy or awkward, the dialog is occationally stilted, and once or twice I’ve felt that a particular twist was from way out in left field, but overall it is pretty good work. Its a fun read, and when they get to the end, if they collect all the comics into a printed work (you can buy them as issues right now), I would probably pick up a hard copy.

As I write this, they are up to 109 pages, which you can read in no time. I definitely recommend it.

Oh, the THINKS you can think!

Random Thoughts

I have always been a dreamer, and when it came to Dr. Seuss, while part of me even now holds a special place for his final work “Oh, the places you’ll go!”, my all time favorite is “Oh, the THINKS you can think!” I suppose my imagination and all the thinks I can think is why I enjoy fantasy and science fiction so much, all of the magic and technology sets my brain sparking. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I were a touch older, just a decade or two, and have had to have lived without the things I have lived with. By today’s standards, even what I grew up with seems like the dark ages. Life without cell phones and the Internet probably seems unbelievable to people younger than me, as much as life without multiplexes and cable television would be strange to me. Every day, in every way, it is like we are living in the future.

I’ve seen laptop computers and palmtop computers, I’ve seen portable devices and ebook readers, but Amazon’s new Kindle, to me, is another one of those leaps, like I’m staring at something that has fallen out of a rip in the space time continuum. The future right now.

We have six five shelf bookcases in our house, and four smaller ones. By width of the shelves we probably have one hundred feet of books, but likely more than that as some of those shelves are two paperbacks deep and double stacked, books laying across the top where we could find room to jam them in. Working in computers, I’m not really surprised to know that all of those could be digitized and stored on a thumb drive, but somehow the idea that all of those books could be purchased, stored and read wirelessly on a device the size of one of those books just makes my head momentarily spin.

I’m sure people will say that nothing will replace the feel, the smell, the experience of books, and to a degree I agree. I’ve got two shelves of children’s books for the children, nieces and nephews that I don’t yet have. I don’t think an electronic device can replace the book you share with a child, at least until they come up with the Kindle 2 with two color screens to better emulate an open book. But outside of that, I think of carrying books with me on the bus as I travel to work, or back to my days of lugging heavy texts around the high school halls and across the college campus and I know that an electronic book from the future would have been a welcome replacement for the weight and the hassle.

Of course, no advancement of technology can come without its own share of pitfalls. The voracity with which my wife and I devour books these days, we’d be bankrupt in no time thanks to the ease at which we could purchase books. Owning such a thing would definitely be a test of will. I suppose we’d be okay as long as we retain the option to not store credit card information on the account. One click purchasing is an innovation I think we’d all be better off not having.

That said… I still want one.

Gearing Up for the WriMo

Writing

Last year’s attempt to participate in the NaNoWriMo did not go so well. I’m hoping this year goes better. I don’t have any more unmarried brothers, I can’t afford any vacations, the open projects at work don’t look like they are going to surge, so this may just be my year.

I’ve been thinking about what I want to do, which story I want to write, and I’m still floundering, unfocused. So, here provided is a list of the things I am thinking about doing, cast your vote.

  • The Jumpgate War: In the future we have finally discovered how to travel between distant star systems, in two pieces, the jump ship and the jump gate. The ships are large hulking vessels, expensive and requiring monstrous amounts of power to jump the ship across space. There are very few of them. Once they find a suitable planet, the crew sets down and installs a jump gate and dials home, with a source at both ends the gates are far easier to use. The nations of Earth (and its nearby planets) have their own goals in the universe, and it turns out that we are not alone.
  • Superhero Harry Potter: Those three words are the easiest way to describe my idea without spending pages to lay it out. A girl, the daughter of superheroes, comes into her own abilities, has to deal with High School and maintain her secret identity.
  • “A Willful Destruction of Life”: This is a very odd idea, because it is no idea at all, it is just a title… the thought here is “Come up with an interesting title, then create a story that fits it.”
  • American Apocalypse: A story about the US after terrorists detonate a nuclear device in Washington D.C. on inauguration day, essentially wiping out the political side of the federal government.
  • Land of the Fairer Sun: A fantasy tale about the return of incarnations of forgotten gods, the rise of a brand new religion of a single god and the kingdom caught inbetween.

I’m also trying to put together a writing group this year to meet on a semi-regular basis, probably at my house, so we can cheer each other on and maybe keep each other from quitting.

15 days until go time…

Thirty-Three

Random Thoughts

Some time later this evening, shortly after eight I think, I will have officially survived thirty-three years of life.

Yay me.

I’m not the kind of guy who believes in omens, or the kind to prophetically announce that this will finally be the year that Fink beats the Stomach, but I do honestly believe that things have to change. I am officially a job burnout. One thing I have prided myself on over the years (well, at least after high school) is my work ethic. I go by the following rules:

  1. A job worth doing is worth doing well.
  2. A job that pays a decent wage is worth doing.
  3. If I accept the job for the offered wage, it must be a decent wage.

By those rules, if I take a job for the money they offer, I’m going to do the best job I can. Right now, though, I am just going through the motions, doing enough work to not get yelled at. I am Peter Gibbons. Even worse, I have noticed myself engineering situations with coworkers to properly lower their expectations so that I can do even less work.

Its a bad situation all around, and honestly its not because I care about the company I’m contracted at, it is because at the end of the day I am disappointed in myself. Add to that, I am officially thirty-three pounds overweight. Maybe I need to be putting a little more stock in these omens and signs and stuff.

My general down turn of attitude has also crept into other aspects of my life. I want a new job, but getting a new job takes effort and I’ve been avoiding it. I have at least a dozen unfinished projects around the house that could have easily been finished by now. I’m sure there is more, but I don’t have the energy to do a full self evaluation right now.

So, my goals for thirty-three:

  • Stop being a lazy shit and get my work ethic back.
  • Stop being a lazy shit and exercise to get my waistline back.
  • Stop being a lazy shit and find a new job that engages and excites me.
  • Stop being a lazy shit and finish some of these projects around the house.

I’m seeing a theme here… guess its time to stop being a lazy shit.

Words in the Workplace

Random Thoughts

Someone at work has been bad. Or at least so I must surmise, since I found a little gem of an email in my inbox the other day gently reminding me of workplace conduct. Here is a little snippet:

Work Policies and Rules:
I understand that it is my responsibility to ensure that my personal conduct and comments in the workplace support a professional environment which is free of inappropriate behavior, language, joke or actions which could be perceived as sexual harassment or as biased, demeaning, offensive, derogatory to others based upon race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran’s status or disability. I further agree to refrain from words or conduct that is threatening and/or disrespectful of others.

From this I can only determine that the only appropriate speech at work is to be completely neutral talk about work tasks, which, ironically, offends me. I suppose this is just one of those gigantic cover-your-ass type things where the company wants to be able to say, “Hey, we said it was not allowed and they did it anyway, so you can’t sue us, just the guy who did the offending.” And it makes me sad that our society is litigious enough that companies need to be constantly covering their asses.

Sadly, though, the main thing this email has done is make me curious about who said or did what to who to trigger this particular ass covering. In true cover-your-ass fashion though, I’ll never be able to find out unless it happened to one of my immediate colleagues. But in true office gossip fashion, I’m sure I’ll hear plenty of theories.