Latest Posts

A Case of the Mondays

Random Thoughts

To be honest, I do not have a problem with Mondays. I do, however, have a problem with all the people who insist on misusing a Monday.

The weekend, Saturday and Sunday, are time off for most people. They relax, they get away from the office and work. For other people, the weekend is time to get work done that can’t be done while everyone else is working. Programming is like this, especially when you are bug fixing a production level program. You can’t make changes to the underlying database in the middle of the day on a work day. You have to wait for late at night, or the weekend.

In one case you are returning to work and are in need of getting back into a work frame of mind. In the other case, you’ve spent the weekend doing one kind of work and are in need of getting back into the normal work mode.

Mondays, used properly, are great for this. On a Monday I like to wake up late, not too much, but about a half hour or hour late. Then I have a good breakfast, something I often skip later in the week. Next I’ll spend some time going through emails and sending out replies. I’ll pull out last week’s paperwork and merge it with the weekend notes, and make myself an organized task list of all the stuff that is still open and is still my responsibility. Just before lunch, I’ll gather up all the easy tasks and polish them. Most of them are so simple that I find myself actually thinking, “Why didn’t I do this earlier?” With the bulk of quick work done, I go to lunch. If I’m at home, I eat and watch some TV; if I’m at work, I eat and chat with coworkers. But in both places, in the back of my mind, I’m sifting and shuffling, organizing and prioritizing. After lunch, I settle in for the long afternoon. Tackle as much as I can in preparation for the rest of the week which is bound to throw me a curve ball or two. This is when I remember why I didn’t do that easy stuff sooner. By the end of a good Monday, the To Do list is half or more done and the coming week has a nice outline of work to be done.

That is how a Monday should be.

It is a shame that so many people insist on trying to cram status meetings and project planning on to Mondays. No one is ever mentally prepared. They are either still too relaxed, or they are just in the wrong frame of mind. All the meetings really do is to force people to rush into action, instead of easing into the week at a brisk walk or comfortable jog, Monday meetings make people hit the ground running… and its why by Wednesday they are begging for the weekend again. And because of the befuddlement and confusion of a rushed Monday, all those meetings will need to be repeated later in the week in some form or another. A giant waste of everyone’s time.

If you are a manager or project lead or anything of the sort, I beg of you to take this to heart. Hold off on those Monday meetings and rush whenever possible. Let your people, in fact encourage your people to, use Monday as a day of preparation. They’ll be much more productive later in the week, I promise.

The Lost Colony

Reviews

I finally got around to finishing off this addition to the Artemis Fowl series, and I must say The Lost Colony keeps up the tradition: a non-stop action story.

Seriously, Eoin Colfer knows how to drop you right into the action at sixty miles per hour and keeps the foot on the gas until the finish line is crossed. He does not waste any time on chapters of boring filler to catch you up to the latest doings of his characters. Instead he joins a subplot right in the middle and dishes out the details as they are needed. Of course, being books aimed at kids I suspect that is intentional since boring slow chapters would lose his audience.

Anyway… this story deals with the lost 8th race of the fairies, demons. Ten thousand years ago, after losing a war with humans when none of the other fairy races would support them, the demons’ warlocks cast a spell a ripped the entire demon island, Hybras, right out of time and sent it into Limbo where they would stay and maybe return when they could defeat the humans. Only, the spell didn’t work right for some reason, the warlocks all died, and Hybras got stuck out of time, but the spell is decaying and demons occasionally get dragged back through time, show up briefly and then vanish, some return, some lost forever. Artemis, who reverse hacked the fairies and found out some details on the time spell, has calculated that the spell is near failing completely which will send Hybras crashing into Now, which will expose the fairies to the world.

And we can’t have that… so the usual suspects are rounded up and head off to figure out how to stop it from failing, or maybe just make it fail in a controlled manner.

Like the other Artemis Fowl books, I enjoyed it. It was a fun quick read, funny and exciting. Good, I think, for kids, and not so bad for adults either.

Useless Technical Websites

Random Thoughts

Most of today I have spent my work time searching the Internet for a solution to a problem that I have. One of the things I have been looking for is information on how to best use HTTP Modules in .NET. Allow me to provide you with an depiction of 99% of the websites I found:

HTTP Modules are great and can do much if you use them well.

When using HTTP Modules, you need to consider exactly what you are trying to accomplish, and then take the steps needed to accomplish it.

In conclusion, HTTP Modules are awesome!

Now take that, make it five hundred or more words and you have a good idea of what I’m getting at. It is an article, written with wonderful verbiage and great care… to make sure they do not actually explain anything. No examples, nothing. Just “This is neat! Its neat because it does stuff! Isn’t that neat?!?” with no bother to actually go into any detail at all about what is does or how to actually use any of it.

And of course, every page is simply overflowing with ads.

Hey you… yeah you, the one who writes pages exactly like the one I described… you are ruining the Internet!

There is just so much noise, I can’t even tell if there is a signal at all anymore…

QuickTime and iTunes

Random Thoughts

I love QuickTime. I hate iTunes. Every PC I get I install QuickTime and all the browser plugins I need in order to watch videos both offline and online. I’ve got some really cool videos I enjoy watching once in a while, so I have to do it.

However, my most recent installation, on my Windows Vista PC, is annoying the crap out of me. I want it to automatically check for updates, but basically every couple days a window pops up and tells me there is a new version out… but it is NOT a new version of QuickTime. It is the exact same version of QuickTime that I have installed, but it is popping up a window to kindly let me know that I can download QuickTime+iTunes.

I don’t want f***ing iTunes. Go away.

Anyway… if anyone knows how I can keep automatic updates on but have it ignore the QuickTime+iTunes, please let me know.

Intent versus Action

Random Thoughts

I admire the sentiment, and I even respect the effort… but seriously, who are they kidding?

The parts that I like about it is that people should do more to conserve. I recycle, I replaced as many lights in my house as possible (and tolerable) with low energy bulbs… I try, and I’d like to think I succeed, even if just a little. My ongoing battle with junk mail isn’t just about trying to stop getting junk, but also doing my part to reduce how much of that wasteful crap they print. At least with junk email, there is no real waste, except the couple seconds a week I spend reviewing the junk folder before deleting it. And any effort to raise awareness has its merit.

The line that really gets me, though, is this one:

Organizers say the concerts will be as green as possible, with a tally of energy use being kept and proceeds from ticket sales going to distribute power-efficient light bulbs and other measures that will offset the shows’ greenhouse gas emissions.

This is what I mean by “Who are they kidding?” Directly from their quote, they will be distributing power-efficient light bulbs as part of their emissions offset. That’s a laugh, because 90% of the bulbs they give out at the concerts will be left on the ground or tossed into the trash (ironically, creating more waste than if they’d just not handed them out at all), and of the 10% that make it home with a concert goer I’d guess that maybe 10% of those will actually get used. So we are looking at 1 in 100 bulbs given out being put to use. That’s 99 bulbs in the trash or sitting unused in a garage or closet.

That’s almost as bad as the idea of buying emissions credits. “Well, we’d really like to help the environment, but rather than change our product or production, we’ll just write a check each year to pay for the offset.” Umm… what? The only possible way this works is if the money used to purchase credit is spent preventing or removing the exact amount of or more pollution the credit is buying. Otherwise, you just end up with the same pollutions and a bunch of money sitting in someone’s bank. I feel like I should have heard about buying emissions credits on Snopes where they would promptly debunk it as yet another email chain letter like that Nigerian gentleman who wants to give me millions of dollars.

It all just doesn’t make any logical sense…

Money is Time

Gaming

Most MMOs have a monthly fee. Since Ultima Online, it has pretty much been the rule. Sure, you get the occasional one like Guild Wars that is free or some of the newer ones where you can start for free but the game has a velvet rope you cannot cross without paying (or in the case of Puzzle Pirates, making trades with people who paid). The current threshold for monthly fees is $15.

Tobold asks “How much would you pay per hour of WoW?”

It is a valid question, and one I’ve been thinking about recently. See, I just canceled my WoW account. Over the last couple of months, I have played very little. too much work, going to see movies, playing on the 360 and the Wii… it all adds up to not enough time to play WoW. But the problem isn’t just not being able to play WoW, it is that I was also maintaining accounts for City of Heroes/Villains and Lord of the Rings Online, and while paying $15 a month to not play WoW wouldn’t bother me horribly, paying $40 a month to not play 3 games begins to be a bit silly.

The way I see to fix that would be to switch to hourly charges. It would be nice if I didn’t have to pay to not play but could still keep my account active. And that comes from a purely lazy point of view. With my WoW account canceled, if the wife and I feel the urge to log in, we will first have to go reactivate accounts, and the time it takes to go to the web page, verify or enter credit card information, and then get back to the game… if we aren’t playing now because of a lack of interest, jumping through hoops to play isn’t going to help.

I would love to be able to maintain accounts in all the games out there, paying for only the time I play them and not having to actually cancel and reinstate my account every time I lose interest. Without a guaranteed monthly fee I probably would have bought Vanguard after I upgraded my PC. Without a guaranteed monthly fee, I probably would have bought EQ2. Many games have and probably will lose my box sale because I just can’t afford another monthly fee.

Now… on the other side of the coin… I understand why developers like that monthly fee. It is much easier to budget. “X” subscribed players times “Y” monthly fee equals “Z” incoming cash minus “A” service providing costs equals “P” profits, which can either be taken to the bank, or reinvested into the game, or into another game. If they had an hourly charge, you might have “X” players, but only 30% of them might play more than 50 hours a month, and another 30% might play less than 5. The player numbers and revenue wouldn’t be a nice smooth pretty graph, it would be covered in spikes for revenue and it would be a never ending climb to the stars for player accounts. (Hint: the “total residents” in that link does not equal “paying subscriber”.)

I think I would even be willing to settle for a minimal account management fee, of about $1 or $2 per game, with an hourly fee above that for the time that I play. But how much is too much per hour? Without any kind of fixed fee, I think Tobold is pretty close to dead on with 25 cents per hour. If they tacked on a small fixed fee for the account, 10 or 15 cents an hour would be more appropriate.

Either way, I would love to have more active games and more options to play, if only I could afford to keep them all.

No Means No

Random Thoughts

When I began to undertake my quest of removing unwanted junk from my life, I guess I never considered how much other people might want to send junk to me. While I would never ever in a million billion years shop at the Golfsmith and would prefer to never get catalogs or coupons from them, they apparently think that sending me unwanted catalogs and coupons is worth the expense to hedge their bets on the minuscule chance that I might change my mind.

My previous experience with them was that I contacted them directly and asked for my address (with my house’s old owners name) be removed from their mailings because I did not want them. And I thought I was successful because the mailings from them (sometimes two or three a week) stopped. But lo and behold, I reach into the mailbox today to find a new Golfsmith catalog. The only change is that it is now addressed to me instead of the old owner.

Obviously, since I’m already not a customer, ignoring me and treating me badly won’t hurt them… or will it? Like the website says… Probably not. I don’t wield enough consumer power to hurt their bottom line, but I can say for certain, at this point, even if I one day do decide to pick up the game of golf I will never shop at the Golfsmith. They’ve lost any chance of ever winning my business.

Right now, I’m experiencing a respite in the deluge of junk mail. My efforts appear to be working. I think I’ve only thrown out maybe two or three pieces of junk this week. But is this Golfsmith ad a sign of things to come? Will I never be able to escape the junk since they will send it to me even when I ask them not to? And do I have any recourse if they continue?

For now, I’ve emailed to the Golfsmith again asking them to remove me from their mailing list. We’ll have to see what happens next.

All Those Moments

Reviews

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” -Roy Batty, Blade Runner (1982)

Quite literally, that is probably one of my favorite quotes in all of Science Fiction film. The moment in which it is uttered is perfect, and the lines are like poetry coming from the lips of a machine that probably does not understand the beauty of the words programmed into his brain. When I saw Blade Runner it was the second Rutger Hauer film I had seen. The first being The Hitcher one night when my parents weren’t paying attention and it was on Cinemax. I was probably 13 years old at the time, and both of those films have stuck with me.

I have always had a soft spot for Rutger’s films. Even when they are mildly cheesy, they are still good, and he always seems tailor made for the parts that he plays. So when I heard that he was putting out an autobiography, I was chomping at the bit to find a copy. Which I did. All Those Moments is a nice, fairly short, but finely detailed recounting of Rutger Hauer’s life, it jumps around a bit and not every single film he made is mentioned, but he tours the highlights, the things that he remembers best and the moments he is most proud of. It is interesting, funny, sometimes heartwarming, and told in a sort of conversational style that makes from easy breezing through the chapters.

He has had a pretty interesting career all around, and as a fan I really enjoyed it. Rutger is also donating all proceeds from the book to his Starfish organization for AIDS, so you get a good read and throw a few bucks at a good cause.