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Makers versus Managers

Random Thoughts

I read this yesterday, and I can’t gush about it enough.  Paul Graham has managed to perfectly nail down exactly the problem that exists between the people who create (programmers, writers, etc) and the people who manage them.

Ultimately, this illustrates the best way to be a good Project Manager.  As a PM, your job is to be the conduit between the development team and the rest of the world.  You meet with your team on their schedule, leaving them large chunks of time to do the creating, and you meet with the other managers on their schedule.  If you have to do a meeting between the developers and the managers, you have to schedule it out a few days and either make it the first or last thing of a day (first is better, putting it at the “end of the day” can mean disaster to the developers who might be hitting a creative stride at 4 p.m. when you want to have your meeting).  I hear that good book editors work the same way, checking in on the writer when its needed for progress reports but not scheduling daily meetings to try to “keep them on task”.

Sadly, most Project Managers I’ve worked with over the years end up becoming just another manager, scheduling meetings with the dev team on a manager’s schedule and getting upset that the dev team’s productivity is dropping, resulting in more meetings and less productivity.

I really hope this article gets around and people take it to heart, because it really is true, and it would really solve a lot of problems.

The First Law

Reviews

Man, it has been a while since I reviewed a book that wasn’t a comic on here… but there is reason for that: I’ve been slogging through Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law trilogy (one, two, three).

Initially, I was going to review each book separately, but then I got to the end of the first book.  I enjoyed it, I liked what I had read, but it really felt like a good start and not a full book.  So I had a hunch, and rather than my usual running off to a new book and coming back to the second book later, I decided to run through all three.  These are big(ish) books, and I’m a slow reader anyway… but I finally did it, and now…

I really want to give this book a high rating.  Notice, I said book and not trilogy.  That’s because this trilogy reads more like a single book broken into three parts instead of three complete stories that work as part of a larger arc.  By the end of the first book you have been introduced to the characters and the world and the politics and wars and history and everything, and a number of exciting things has happened, but all those things don’t add up to anything satisfying.  Nothing is really resolved in the first book.  The second book is more of the same, and I mean that in both good and bad ways.  More people, more events, but the only real events that occur are one expected failure and one unexpected failure.  The second book did seem more rounded than the first, but it still left me wanting.  Not wanting for more, but wanting for the book to have meant something.  The third book reads like a good third act.  All the people and places coming crashing back together and lots of things coming to an end.

Overall, this trilogy would, in my opinion, benefit from some heavy editing, trimming this story down to one novel, or perhaps two.  I get the feeling that maybe the author had an idea and decided he wanted it to be a trilogy and fleshed the story out until it was.  A number of chapters could easily be cut, others trimmed and combined, and perhaps even the world itself could have been shrunk just a tad in order for the author not to feel like he needed to illustrate just how long certain journeys were.  I suppose my complaint is the same that I have for the Lord of the Rings, The First Law is like a travelogue.  We walk the world and are shown everything, but seeing that seminal work of fiction trimmed down to under 9 hours of script without losing one bit of the magic of the original, I think The First Law could be just as good at half the length.

That said, I look forward to read more by Joe Abercrombie.  The main reason for this is that after finishing this trilogy I thoroughly despise most of his characters, and yet I found myself rooting for them.  That is something hard to do, in my opinion.  To craft character that are not only flawed but flat out wrong and still get the reader to want them to survive, to be redeemed even when the character themselves is seeking no redemption.  I find myself having imaginary conversations with the author, “Hey, I really want to like this guy, could you please stop making him do horrible things?”

Anyway… would I recommend these books?  I would, maybe not to everyone, but to people who like a good well crafted world akin to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series and are willing to put up with one story being told in three books and 1,500 pages.

Moon over a Castle

Pictures

This morning’s doodle was my attempt at drawing in the negative.  I wanted to do an image set at night, but I didn’t want to draw in white on a black background, so I doodled with black on white and when I got the image to where I wanted it, I inverted the colors.  It came out well enough that I didn’t bother doing any touch ups after the invert.

Moon over a Castle
Moon over a Castle

Of course, my edge bleed to white works less well with this theme’s image border, but if not for that, I like the effect of the uneven edge like perhaps looking through a window in winter.

Movie Round-Up: July 24th, 2009

Reviews

G-Force:

Seriously?  I guess its okay that all I want to do is mock this film since I am clearly not the target audience… but, super-spy gerbils?  Really?

Orphan:

I managed to find passes to a screening of this film, and I’m glad I did.  I’m not sure I’d want to pay for this one.  Its not complete crap, and in fact it is quite enjoyable… solid performances by all the actors, and the dialog is decent enough, and I even thought the “secret” was clever.  But it wasn’t very scary.  In fact, most of the audience was laughing through much of the film.  Sure, there were a couple of scenes that made you jump, and a couple of things that made you cringe, but it just wasn’t scary.  A little creepy maybe.  If I were you, trying to decide where to spend my hard earned wages this weekend, I’d hold off on Orphan and spend it somewhere else.  Catch this one on DVD or cable.

The Ugly Truth:

“Tonight… we dine… in Heigl!” “This!  Is!  Dating!”  Sorry, couldn’t resist.  But if I have to admit to a man-crush, it would be Gerard Butler, even before the whole 300 thing.  And I’ve liked Ms. Heigl since “Roswell”, so this movie already had two things going for it.  Throw in the fact that I’m a sucker for battle of the sexes romantic comedies and you’ve earned my $10.  I didn’t get to see an early screening of this film, and so I’ll be paying my way like everyone else this weekend.  I don’t see any way this movie could possibly be disappointing.

Admission of Fault

Random Thoughts

Recently, I’ve gone to “war” with Comcast.  This year marked the final turnover to digital and the end of analog broadcast.  For the past 18 months, I had kept in contact with Comcast about the effect this would have on my analog cable.  See, the basic cable – channels 2 thru 78 – are all I really watch, so that’s all we have, and you don’t need set top boxes for that, which allowed me to build Medusa, my 6-tuner PVR running Snapstream’s software.  I admit I watch a lot of TV, but the main problem is that quite often even if I only watch three or four shows on a single night, they’ll always air at the same time.  Years ago I managed this by having four VCRs, but times have changed and I upgraded.  In any event, Comcast assured me that nothing would change, my analog devices would continue to work just fine.  On many occasions over this time period, I inquired about the future of analog service, and every single time I was assured that Comcast had no plans to end analog service for the cable package of channels 2 thru 78.

So, one day there was a problem with my cable.  It seemed I was only getting channels 2 thru 29 or 30, everything above that was gone.  I called in to Comcast customer service and asked what was going on.  They explained it was an outage, and regular service would return soon.  Seeing as I already had them on the phone, I again inquired about the future of analog services.  I asked if this division of 2 thru 30 and 31 thru 78 was a precursor to them moving 31 thru 78 to digital only.  I was assured that there were no changes planned.  None.  Channels 2 thru 78 would continue to be available for all analog users.

In the meantime, over the past couple of years, I have watched with anticipation the development of digital tuner cards for PCs.  At first the support was iffy, but now pretty much all software supports them, and given a good enough PC they’ll even watch and record HD channels broadcast “in the clear”, like your local network affiliates.  I’ve been budgeting my money in plans to upgrade my PVR so that I could take advantage of digital, but its not exactly cheap to do, and besides, I still had time.

Imagine my surprise when, the day after the outage above and being assured that analog was not going to change, I received a letter in the mail explaining that channels 31 thru 78 were being moved to digital only on August 11th of this year.  That couldn’t be right since just the day before I was told it wouldn’t change, and mailings like this take weeks to plan out.  So I called customer service again, and with letter in hand was told again that there was no planned change for analog service, channels 2 thru 78 would continue to be available.  But a quick search of the Internet found several locations, including Comcast’s own website, telling people about the future and channels being moved off analog.

Now, here we come to the “war”.  See, I’m not actually upset by the digital switch.  I expected it would come eventually, hence why I’ve been planning to upgrade my PC… next year, when my budget can afford it.  And I completely understand and even agree with the need for change: when you move analog to digital it takes far less bandwidth and allows you to have more channels and services.  My problem is that I was lied to.  As far as I can see, one of two things had happened.

  1. Failure of Management: The customer service group was not properly trained or informed about the August 11th channel moves to digital, and therefore the reps I spoke to were telling me what they believed to be true.
  2. Failure of Employee: The customer service reps, not wanting to deal with a possibly irate customer, chose to not inform me of the digital change, on which they had been fully informed and trained.

There is no other possibility.  Either the reps lied to me, or the reps were not properly trained.

I decided, for the first time in my life, to actually write a complaint to the Better Business Bureau.  I wrote in detail about my 18 months of contact and the day of the outage and the mailer I received.  I even wrote that I understood why the change was being made and that Comcast had every right to do so, but that I was lied to through one of the reasons above and I would like something done about it.

Since writing this complaint, the case has gone back and forth between Comcast and myself.  I have been called on several occasions and emailed a number of times.  Every time they contact me, I get a spiel about how there were two digital changes (the government mandated change and the Comcast channel moves) and this lead to confusion (despite my most recent calls being AFTER the government mandated change), and that I can continue getting all my channels by simply getting a set top box, which they will provide, or replace my analog tuners with digital tuners, which I will have to do myself.  Every time, I report the resolution as unsatisfactory because there is only one thing I want: Admission of fault.

I want someone from Comcast to call me and tell me the staff was improperly trained, or tell me that reps have been found lying to customers to avoid confrontation.  I want Comcast to admit that the failure existed on their end, in their processes or with their people, and to apologize for it having happened.  I want someone to say they are sorry and that the customer service department should have informed me of the impending channel moves on all calls made after some date.  This is the one thing I have not heard from Comcast.  And I probably never will.

It is not just them, of course, its systemic.  Companies do everything in their power to never admit fault.  Well, I’m tired of it, and this time, in my only piddling and puny way, I’m fighting back.  this case through the BBB will never be resolved until someone from Comcast admits fault.

As for my personal resolution for Comcast’s change of service, since my budget will not allow for rebuilding my PC (not only do I need new tuners, since the best ones are PCI Express and my PC is old enough to only have PCI, I have to get a new motherboard, processor, memory, video card, etc… the hard drive is IDE, not SATA… in fact the only thing I can keep is the case), and with budget being the main concern in this economy, I’ll be canceling my cable TV service.  Thanks to Hulu and individual network web pages, everything I want to watch is online anyway.  In the end, Comcast’s refusal to admit fault is probably going to wind up saving me over $50 a month.

Zombies! Eclipse of the Undead

Reviews

While visiting my brother this past weekend, he was offering up to me some of his graphic novels and trade paperbacks to read.  One of those was Zombies! Eclipse of the Undead.  I was going to borrow it, but ended up reading the whole thing before I left.

Its a fairly typical and fairly decent story.  Zombies.  In this case, people have gathered for safety in a local football stadium.  The military has been ordered to pull out and leave the people to fend for themselves.  Of course, all hell breaks loose.

One of the best aspects of this particular tale is the effectiveness of showing how simply not paying attention is the biggest killer when it comes to the genre.  People get focused on one thing and forget they are surrounded by zeds, and then they get dead.

Overall, a good, quick read.  I look forward to future Zombies! trades.

[amazon-product image=”51EYhIuXdrL._SL160_.jpg” type=”image”]1600100694[/amazon-product]

Ring The Bell

Random Thoughts

I own a house.  This house has a front door.  Just to the right of the door there is a button.  If you were to come to the front door of my house and push the button a magical thing occurs: inside the house, a bell rings and lets everyone inside know that the button next to the front door has been pushed, indicating that a person standing at that front door would like to speak with someone inside the house.

If you were to approach that same door and instead of ringing the bell you were to just knock on the door, due to the nature of acoustics and the properties of sound waves, if there is not a person standing in the foyer or in the living room, the possibility is quite high that they will not hear the knock.  This is the purpose of the bell.  This electronic device, this button, is connected to speakers in a couple of places in the house, arranged in just such a way that a person anywhere in the house will hear it.

So, when I order a pizza, I expect the pizza delivery person to come to the door and push the button.  He has my pizza, and I’m fairly certain he would like money in exchange for it, and the best way to facilitate that transaction would be to push the button and notify someone inside the house that he has arrived.  And yet, every single pizza delivery person from every single pizza place that will deliver here approaches the door with pizza in hand… and knocks.  Being that I spend so little time in the foyer and the living room, and instead can often be found watching TV in the media room, or on the computer, or possibly even in the room with the workout equipment, I cannot hear the knock.  Now this, in and of itself, wouldn’t be too remarkable.  He knocks, he waits, perhaps he knocks again, he waits, then perhaps he gets impatient and rings the bell.  Not the optimum path, but acceptable.  However, this is not what happens.  Instead, he knocks, he waits, he knocks again, he waits… then he gets out his cell phone and calls the phone number associated with the order.

The package delivery men are worse.  They simply knock, drop the package on the doorstep and run away.  So, not only have they not notified me of their presense, they have also left potentially expensive goods unattended at my front door.  My house, in addition to having a front door and a door bell, has a garage.  I park there, and being as my car is there, when I come and go from the house it is very rarely through the front door.  Due to this, packages have sometimes sat on my doorstep for a day or two, especially when said package comes through the USPS and I was not given a tracking number by which to follow the progress of the shipment online.

At first, I thought this might be because people could not see the button.  But I checked, it lights up.  Even in the darkest night, the button is visible.  But perhaps its harder to see during the day.  No.  I checked that too, and the button is raised and clearly distinguishable from the surroundings.  Perhaps I need to place a sign on my door that says, “Please ring the bell.”  But part of me worries that a sign like really says, “I absolutely cannot hear people making noise at my front door, so please, break in.”  Not that I’m horribly worried about people breaking in.  We live in a nice neighborhood, and I don’t have a whole lot worth stealing.  No cash, no jewels.  Just electronics, and most of those are heavy or locked down in some way, and I just don’t envision a thief hauling my whole desk out the front door just to get my PC.

All in all, I just don’t understand why people do not ring the bell.  It exists for that purpose.  If I didn’t want people to push the button and ring the bell, I’d remove the button.

Wizard 101

Gaming

This will be my one and only post on the game Wizard 101 under the Freeloading heading on this blog.

Back when this game was under development, I got an invite into beta.  The basics of the game are a collectible card game, not unlike Magic: The Gathering or other similar games, but to speed up the process they’ve removed the concept of land and resources and replaced them with hit points and mana which you have from the start and carry around like any other MMO.  I immediately liked the game.  One, because it was so vastly different from the MMOs that I had played thus far, and also because it seemed like a great game for kids.  Not that I have kids or anything, but I respected the hell out of the game because they obviously chose their market and built a game nearly perfectly designed for that market.  That doesn’t happen as often as it should with MMOs.  Usually MMOs start off very generic and then through beta testing they start tailoring the game to some demographic for launch, which is often not the same demographic they will court over the life of the game.  But Wizard 101 started in one place and have stuck with it, and done it well.  That said, when the game exited beta and launched, I didn’t play… because I was playing other games at the time and this one just wasn’t what I was looking for.

First, let’s get technical.  I’ve got a 2.3Ghz single core processor, 2GB RAM, and a GeForce 7900 GS.  Its an older PC, probably two years at this point, and it wasn’t exactly top of the line when I got it.  Wizard 101 runs like a dream.  It is fast, loads quick, and never lags.  I’ve stood in the Commons with easily 50 or more players on my screen and everything moves fluidly.  And the game looks great.  Sure, its not FarCry level of realistic detail, its cartoony, like World of Warcraft but aimed more at kids.  And I’m running at the highest levels of detail with the best textures all at 1920 x 1200 resolution.  More games need to be able to do this.  Now on to game play…

As with the other game currently appearing in the Freeloading heading, my goal with Wizard 101 was to play without paying.  So I loaded the game up and my beta character was still there.  Level 5 (I think), wearing only gear that he’d gotten playing the game as I had never bought anything.  I’d played through all the content of Unicorn Way in the beta (well, almost all, it seems that a couple of quests had been added since, but those didn’t take any time at all to finish off).  I don’t remember how long it took me to accomplish that, but I can’t imagine it took me more than a couple or three days, maybe 8 hours of play at the most.    So, what remained was Golem Court, Triton Avenue and the Haunted Cave.  Every other door was either locked or would present me with a screen asking me to buy the area or a subscription.  Three days.  Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday Morning.  That’s how long it took me to finish up every single quest I could find that didn’t require entry into an area that wasn’t free, so if I had been starting with a new fresh character it probably would have taken a week.  But then again, this game wasn’t made to be played hardcore like this.  It’s designed to be done in small chunks, a quest or two at a time.

One of the most awesome things about Wizard 101 is that if you need help fighting a boss that is too difficult and there is no one around (likely because the game put you on a lower population server when you logged in) you can go to the options screen and switch to another server or another copy of your area, literally within seconds (one loading screen, which is even faster than other loading screens because you’ve already loaded the zone).  This made getting stuck nearly impossible.  I’d get to a door to a boss and wait a few seconds, look around, and if I didn’t see anyone heading my way, click click click, I’d be on another server.  If there was still no one around, I had to wait 60 seconds to be able to switch servers again.  It never took more than 2 or 3 server hops to find someone else standing at the boss’s door and we’d go in and fight together.

Much like Free Realms, Wizard 101’s greatest weakness is its social interaction.  Being a game aimed at kids, they’ve put in plenty of parental controls and the only way to ensure that another player can read what you say is to stick to the canned text.  Click the word bubble icon in the upper left of the screen and navigate the menu to find something like “I need healing” or “Let’s go fight [insert quest monster here]!”  If you type your own words, you run the risk of people seeing only “…” which is what the game replaces questionable text with.  The most important use of the friend list isn’t actually to keep track of your friends, but to use the “Teleport to Friend” function to get through a door you can’t get through on your own.  Not into pay areas for free, I tried, but some boss doors will not be available to you if you have not gotten to that part of the quest chain yet.  Instead, the person with the quest invites you as a friend, they enter, then you use the teleport function to join them.  My friends list is full of people I used or that used me to get inside towers.  I practically jumped out of my chair the first time I encountered a person who was actually chatting.  We talked for about a minute, but they had to log out.  Its been nothing but canned text ever since.

Again, like Free Realms, even with the social aspects so weak, the game is actually quite fun to play.  Like any collectible card game, there is strategy to building decks, choosing your cards to include, and strategy in the order to play them, and game knowledge of what monsters have what cards and guessing the builds of their decks.  Especially if one gets into the PvP arena area of the game, I can easily see this being many long hours of building decks and playing matches.  I messed around in the practice area myself and quickly realized that if I wanted any real challenge I would need to pay to get access to the ranked arena as my deck simply blew away most of the people I played with.  (Hint: as most card gamers know, a fat deck is not always better, I use the Starter Deck that has less slots so I can more predictably get the cards I want, reducing the luck of the draw.)

The one place that Wizard 101 really shines over Free Realms is how they do their unlocking.  Both offer a subscription that unlocked all game content, Wizard 101’s is more expensive by a couple dollars, but Wizard 101 does not lock any classes or cards (at least that I’ve run into) requiring membership to use.  Free Realms is lousy with them.  Probably 60% of items I get from questing in Free Realms I can’t use as a free player.  Wizard 101 also allows you to buy areas, unlocking them forever.  So if you want to go to Firecat Alley, you can buy it for 750 crowns (in game cash) which equates to about $1.50, less if you buy crowns in bulk.

And this is why this post will be Wizard 101’s one and only appearance under the Freeloading heading.  Where Free Realms hasn’t yet convinced me to spend any money on it at all, yesterday I dropped $10 on Wizard 101 for 5000 crowns so I could unlock more areas to play in.  I’ve heard you can unlock the entire game for $80 (with the exception of the arena, which you pay per fight or per day, or subscribe for unlimited play).  That is about the best review I can give a Free 2 Play game: it hooked me enough to give them money.  You win, Wizard 101.  You win.

A Guy with Glasses

Pictures

I’m a doodler.  At work, when I’m on the phone or thinking about programming solutions, I’ll grab a pad or a stack of post-its and a pen and doodle.  I used to do it during boring meetings, but I don’t have those anymore (one of the joys of working for a small company).  That said, I’ve had a Wacom Bamboo tablet for some time now and put it to very little use.  Having learned to make graphics using Paint Shop Pro (versions 4 thru 7, before they got bought by Corel and all the program controls changed), I’ve never been comfortable with the way that programs like Photoshop and GIMP do things, so whenever I needed a new image for my website, or even work, I’d often try to use some other program and then run back to PSP once I got frustrated.

So, in a concerted effort to learn GIMP, use my tablet, and doodle more than just randomly, I’ve decided to dedicate Saturdays at the blog to posting doodles I’ve made n GIMP with the tablet.  I’ll try to post at least one image per week, but we’ll see how that goes.  Without further ado…

A Guy with Glasses
A Guy with Glasses

As you can see, my hand with the Wacom stylus is a bit shaky.  I’m just not used to drawing with one hand while watching the screen, translating movements out of site to movements on the screen.  I suspect I’ll get better, because I do actually have quite a fair bit of hand-eye coordination.  But just like perfecting a no-look baseball catch as a kid, it’ll take some practice.

Another thing I’ll be working on as I do this is repetition.  I’ve always wanted to draw cartoons, and I’ve been told that, at least with pencil and paper, I’m not a bad artist.  The one thing I can’t do is repeat an image, or draw a similar image with slight changes.  You know, like a character from frame to frame with movement.  They always end up distorted, with different shaped heads or different proportioned bodies.  If anyone knows of exercises they’d recommend for improving drawing consistency, I’d appreciate hearing about them.

Movie Round-Up: July 17th, 2009

Reviews

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

This actually opened Wednesday, and its going to be huge.  Millions of people will see it, and I’ve seen quite a few good reviews of it already.  I’ve seen the other ones in the theater, so it is quite likely I’ll make the trek to the local multi-plex in order to plunk down my hard earned dollars for this one as well.  However, now that I’ve seen how the books end, and knowing that they’ve decided to split the last book into two movies, I’m just not as excited as I once was for these movies.  Perhaps the movies will end better.

(500) Days of Summer:

Opening in very few theaters and opposite Harry Potter means that this movie will probably not be noticed by many people, and that’s a shame.  (500) Days of Summer is a brilliant comedy that is not a love story.  Its a film about a break up, all from the point of view of the guy.  I was lucky enough to catch a free screening of this film and I absolutely loved it.  I’d almost consider going and buying tickets for it even if I don’t see it again just to support the filmmakers.  If this one happens to be showing at a theater near you, I highly recommend it.