Forewarned is Forearmed

Be careful what you read today
Be careful what you believe
The truth is out to lunch all day
And lies have a reprieve

They may tell you what you want to hear
They may make you want to scream
Do not do anything rash today
Though important it may seem

Double check your sources
And remember to keep your cool
Because you would not want to be
The one who is the fool

Hot Fuzz

My super secret special contact (my brother’s wife) came through once again with free passes to see a movie screening. This time, from the guys who brought you Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz.

What Shaun did for zombies, Hot Fuzz does for buddy cop films.

Nick Angel (Simon Pegg) is an overachieving London cop. In fact, he makes everyone else look bad, so they ship him off to a small village far away from London. Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) is a local cop with no real ambition, but has a love of action films and a father who is the head cop in town. The locals are pretty lax on the letter of the law, but Nick refuses to change his attitude. And that’s when the murders begin… of course, everyone else in town seems to buy them as accidents, but not Nick and Danny.

All in all, seriously funny. I was laughing through nearly the entire film, while at the same time being thrilled with chases and gunfights and explosions and an unravelling mystery. Edgar Wright directs a top notch film, he and Simon can really write great comedy, and all the actors pull it off in style. If you liked Shaun of the Dead, you’ll like Hot Fuzz too.

As a bonus for the night at the movies, Simon, Nick and Edgar were all in attendance and did a wonderful Q&A afterwards. Fantastic!

Hell to Pay

Just finished up the latest in the Nightside series of books by Simon Green entitled Hell to Pay. Like the rest of the series, the story is about private investigator John Taylor who has a gift for finding things. In this tale, John is hired by Jeremiah Griffin, a man whose immortality is rumored to come from a deal with the devil, to find his missing granddaughter Melissa.

Of course, no tale in the Nightside is ever that simple… and yet, this book, so far, I’d call the weakest in the series. It is, for lack of a better term, a circle. One of those stories that ends where it begins, you meet the kidnapper within the first couple of chapters (to me it was painfully obvious who it was), and after taking a tour around the other suspects our hero returns to save the day in the nick of time.

It wasn’t a bad book… if you enjoy the Nightside books, this certainly keeps in line with the rest in its introduction of well-known places that everyone but you, the reader, has heard of, and characters half of which are interesting and the other half are forgettable. The mystery here is really no mystery at all, Green practically hits you over the head with most of the clues you need right at the beginning. But still, an enjoyable read… and despite it being on my “Currently Reading” box for so long, it really only took maybe a day to read if I’d done so in one sitting (doing it five minutes at a time can drag out any book). Pick it up to complete the set, but if you are looking for an introduction to the Nightside, start with the first book, not this one.

How do you play?

Ryan Shwayder over at the nerfbat has begun a discussion on the definitions of Hardcore and Casual.

I think, especially if you delve into the comments, he is pretty near the target. Essentially, I think its impossible to define a player simply as hardcore or casual for their entire entity. Instead, you have to break it down into many factors.

For instance, game play time. Someone who is casual with their time in games wants something they can pick up and play with in ten minutes, or two hours, or whenever they happen to want to play. Often this is referred to as “time-starved” but I feel adding the usage of “starved” there just gives it a desperate and needy connotation… also, it implies that if the person had more time they’d spend it gaming, but that really isn’t true at all. Someone who is hardcore with their time is going to schedule blocks, often large blocks, of time to play… three hours, five hours, Saturday. The time hardcore player is the kind of player who spends all their free time gaming.

Further down you can get into distinctions like “knowledge commitment” which would be how willing is the player to remember bits of information or lore of the game. I know when it comes to this, I’m very hardcore… not by choice really, it just sort of happens. If EverQuest (the original) were to have a free weekend starting today, I bet I could log in and get around fairly well. Even though I have not played it in a few years, I still know where stuff is (as long as the zone hasn’t been revamped). The wife on the other hand, well, we play World of Warcraft about once a week, and lots of times she just doesn’t remember where anything is. Its not because she has a bad memory, but because its simply not important to her to remember it. Plus, she has me, and I remember everything, so…

You can literally take any aspect of any game, show a hardcore and a casual approach to it, and show how its not really dependent on any other aspect. To use the example above, the wife and I both love to explore and are fairly hardcore about going new places. She just happens to think that almost everywhere is a new place since she doesn’t commit to memory having gone there.

So… what’s the answer? What is the definition of hardcore and casual? I think the answer is, “It depends.” Even Ryan’s attempt to narrow it down to 4 points isn’t going to cover everything. Is it enough to design a game by? Sure, and as long as you accept that no matter how few or how many boxes you draw there will always be players who live outside them, you’ll be just fine.

The Grapevine

In the last five or so years, I have, despite being employed, always kept my resume updated at a number of job sites. I even occasionally call recruiters I have worked with to get a feel for the marketplace. Most times I am not really looking for a job, but I want to keep my eyes and ears open just in case that opportunity of a lifetime comes by.

The drawback to this is that at least once a week I waste five to ten minutes of my life talking to a recruiter, most of whom really stink at their job. They call, ask if I’m looking for work and then say “We have some really great opportunities that I think you might be a perfect fit for, just email me your resume and I’ll get back to you.” Most of them never get back to me, not even to just say “Hey, got your resume, but it looks like we don’t have anything for you, sorry.” This is why I say they stink.

The recruiters that I stay in touch with are the ones who know how to handle a job candidate. They didn’t just ask for my resume, they asked about my jobs, my work. They took notes, often making recommendations for how I might punch up my resume to get me what I’m looking for. When it comes to sending me on an interview, the good recruiters give me a run down of the company, the people I’ll be talking to, and what I can expect. The bad ones never do that, they just set up the time and say “Call me after so I know how it goes.”

This is where I come to the reason I titled this post “The Grapevine”.

Have you ever played that game as a kid? Where you line up and the person at one end is whispered a couple sentences that convey information, then each person in turn whispers the sentences to the next person in line, and at the end the last person says the sentences out loud and it is compared to the original sentences. Often times its hilarious how much the original content can change as each person relayed what they felt was the most important parts. This, in essence, is often what happened in job recruiting.

A company needs to fill a position, but they don’t feel they have the time to personally sift through applicants and only want to interview the most qualified, so they hire an agency to do the leg work. The company gives a description of the position to the recruiting company contact, who is often times not a recruiter themselves. This person then enters the job requirements into their system, and this is where, I feel, the first errors begin to creep in. The job description will get altered just a little bit to fit the recruiting companies standards, emphasizing key words and phrases, trimming to fit, elaborating out of thin air.

Meanwhile, on the other end, I, the job hunter, builds a resume, trying to outline my skills. I then go to a job website, where I’m forced to break down my resume into key words and phrases for searching. Some times breaking down the resume completely distorts the information.

Now enters the recruiter who searches the job site using the key words from the job description looking for matches. He reads the resume and the requirements and tries to decide if the two marry up well.

The result: 9 out of 10 interviews I go to usually ends up in disaster. Sure, the key words of my resume matched up with the key words of the job description, but the realities of both are completely different. I say I’m a .NET/C# programmer for web applications, the job is looking for someone with .NET/C# experience but for desktop applications and really they don’t use the .NET platform, just the C# language to support old C++ DLLs and COM Interop, but I’m here because my resume and their job description were both boiled down to simply .NET/C# and looked like a perfect match!

There is nothing quite like the feeling of spending ten minutes shooting the shit with someone, getting a feel for the person and liking them, only to start the technical interview and realize that your skillset and their needs are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

And the recruiters always ask “Are you working with any other recruiters?” Yes. Of course I am. With results like these, how can I afford not to?

The Reviews Are In

I love to browse Amazon.com. Every since they improved the hell out of their wish lists and organizer functions, I love looking at the recommended products for both myself and for the people whom I’ve registered gift giving occasions for. (If you haven’t taken advantage of the gift lists and organizer features of Amazon, I suggest you do.) Its kinda neat to see what gets recommended to me and why it got recommended. Is it from stuff on my wish list? Is it from stuff I own? I’ve even been recommended things because of stuff I’ve rated low… it didn’t come out and say it, but basically it was showing me an item because I’d rated “opposite” items with only one star.

Once I’ve found an item that is intriguing to me, I then find myself browsing the reviews of the items. Sometimes you come across some real comedy gems in there, like the now long deleted review of the xbox 360 where it overheated setting the house on fire and killed his family but he gave it a 5 star rating because up to that point the games were really fun. But mostly, I spent my time actually reading the bad reviews of items.

Frankly, I could not care less about the opinions of someone who thinks that the product is the best thing since sliced bread, because… well… a gushing “my god this is awesome!!!!!1!1!!!!!” review just doesn’t help. So instead I sort the reviews from lowest to highest rated, and start reading in the gutter. The negative reviews are so much more helpful. Firstly, its easier to spot a negative nutjob than to spot a crazy product lover. “I bought this book and it had pages!! You mean I have to read it myself?!?!” Second, once you’ve decided the reviewer isn’t a nutjob, you can focus in on what exactly they didn’t like and decide if you also will not like it, which is often more beneficial than trying to align your tastes with someone’s positive review, mostly because people who love something tend to be willing to overlook flaws… flaws which to you might be very important.

Anyway, those are my random thoughts of the day…

A Change Gonna Come

Its not often I post in the Site News section, but hey, I’ve got site news… I’ve been looking at new themes for a while now, but I’ve been holding off redoing them because I also wanted to upgrade to the latest WordPress, which required a newer version of MySQL than I had available.

Well, after much wrangling, my database was finally migrated to a new server, and as I type this the latest WordPress is uploading. So a new theme is coming…

I was born by a river in a little tent,
And just like this river,
I’ve been running ever since.
It’s been a too long, too long-time a-coming,
But I know a change gonna come,
Oh, yes, it is.

It’s been too hard living,
And I’m afraid to die.
I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky.
It’s been a long time a, long time a-coming,
But I know, Lord I know a change gonna come, Lord.
Yeah, yes.

And then I went to see my brother, oh yeah.
I said, “Brother, help me, please.”
He turned me down.
And then I went, I went to see my sweet mother.
I said, “Mama, Mama I’m down on my knees.”
It’s been a too hard living,
And I’m afraid to die.
I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky.
It’s been a long, long time a-coming,
But I know, but I know a change gonna come.
Oh, long.

-Sam Cooke

Zodiac

Thanks to the usual hookup, the wife and I went out to see a sneak preview of Zodiac last night. If you are unfamiliar with the subject, the movie is about the famous Zodiac serial killer of the late 1960’s. Read more about him here.

As for the movie, its a David Fincher film, so given how much I have loved his other movies (Panic Room, Fight Club, The Game, Se7en… even AlienĀ³), I had high expectations for this film. However, it is a telling of factual events with a little fiction thrown in to round out the edges, so I tried to go in with an open mind.

The movie is good. The direction and cinematography are great. The actors each play their roles extremely well, and they portray the frantic and frustration of the case to perfection. And that leads to the downside of this film… in truth, the Zodiac killed was never caught, never brought to justice, so if you are looking for satisfaction and closure, the story of the Zodiac is not where you want to look. This is a story about reporters and police officers desperately trying to figure out a series of crimes and to catch a killer who taunts them with letters where every pieces of evidence leads somewhere but proves nothing. At one point there is a scene of one of the characters frantically sifting through the half dozen or more boxes of files pertaining to just one of the killings illustrating the sheer volume of the mountain of interviews, clues, evidence and suspects.

It is a slow film, almost like watching a documentary with re-enactments, but it is interesting to see people’s lives come together and fall apart all around this case. It is not a great film, its not something I would watch a dozen times, but I enjoyed it, and certainly didn’t think it was a waste of my time. If the Zodiac interests you, go see it. If not… wait to rent it.

You Suck: A Love Story

I just finished reading Christopher Moore’s latest book, You Suck: A Love Story, which is a sequel to a previous book of his called Bloodsucking Fiends.

As expected its full of moderately crazy characters who do all sorts of funny and weird things, not the least of which here is being a vampire. I’m not going to go into alot of detail, but like all of Moore’s books, its a fun read, and in my opinion worth the money and the time.

Music and Lyrics

Continuing our Valentine’s Day tradition, the wife and I made our way down to the local megaplex and saw a film. Previous outings have included Under the Tuscan Sun and Finding Neverland. This year was Music and Lyrics.

Music and Lyrics stars Hugh Grant as Alex Fletcher a former 80’s pop star who has done nothing of importance since. As a fan of the 80’s I immediately recognized his character as Andrew Ridgeley of WHAM! Of course, in the film the bad is called POP!, but its close enough. Alex writes music, but he’s no good at lyrics, and he’s been asked by a new pop sensation, Cora (think a mix of Shakira and Britney), to write a new song for the two of them to perform. Luckily, Alex finds Drew Barrymore as Sophie Fisher, who is taking over for a friend watering Alex’s plants, and she happens to be a natural lyricist.

Sparks fly, comedy ensues and love blooms. To be honest, its formulaic and there isn’t much in the way of surprises… but that doesn’t mean its not a good movie. Its hilarious, its romantics, heart warming and funny. It is a fantastic date flick, and if you love the cheese of 80’s music its just that much better.

Yeah… I recommend this movie. Go see it with someone special.