Quod Scripsi, Scripsi

Neverwinter Nights 2 and other Gaming Goodness

I’m a bit burned out on computer games. I’m just dipping my toes back into World of Warcraft after being away for several months. I might jump back into Anarchy Online for a bit too, but just to visit. I’ve been playing NWN2 for a couple of months, and it’s very excellent. I’m at a point now that I’m not really sure how I want to proceed. The keep management aspect of the game is fun and very innovative, but it’s also buggy and lacks some larger direction. It’s sort of like playing a strategy game with no opponent – do I really need arrow slits in my fortifications? What’s going to be more lucrative, patrolling roads or securing the countryside? It would be nice to have more insight into the mechanics. Storyline is very cool, though similar to the first one in some respects.

I would love to play some real face to face stuff soon. I’m a bit of a gamer, if you didn’t know. Wargames, RPG, Euros, strategy, card, you name it and I’ll probably try it. I have a stack of wargames at home waiting for opponents. I just read the rules to A Victory Lost and it might just be approachable enough to rope in a non-wargamer. The World of Warcraft CCG is big at work, but I’ve sworn off CCGs and – here’s a dirty little secret – I just don’t find the Warcraft mythology all that interesting. It’s disjointed, predictable and in many areas is obviously just pasted on. Some of it is cool, and I’ve obviously enjoyed the MMO, but no thanks on the extra stuff. I now have a BattleLore addiction anyway…

Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro Printing Strangeness

I was printing a form in Acrobat 8 Pro on my Mac Pro Tower. The form had been created in an earlier version of Acrobat. The printer is a networked HP Color LaserJet 3800dtn. The output is “mirrored”, that is it would look correct if you held the document up and read it in a mirror. I updated my printer drivers and the printer firmware with the latest from the HP site. No change. I did find one post on a forum about the issue, but no resolution.

I opened my XP image in Parallels on the same machine, opened the same exact file in Acrobat 8 Win and printed to the same printer using the latest PCL6 driver. Worked fine. This is a really strange bug.

Blogs as Reporting Tools

From a conversation in ITLP about weekly reporting and project tracking, I’m thinking that a weekly blog entry from each of my reports would be a useful tool for keeping in touch and aware of progress and projects. It could also be useful for keeping peers and bosses in the loop. There’s also the potential benefit at SRDP time. It would have to be mandated at least weekly, with some definition of expectation – not numbers and metrics but descriptions of what each person worked on, problems encountered, successes and lessons learned.

Creatology

My director forwarded to me an email that discussed an article in Time Magazine about disciplined creativity. Five principles were given:

1. Pick important, not interesting, problems.

2. Assess each potential innovation for its value to customers.

3. Appoint a champion who is committed to the project. At SRI it’s “No champion, no project, no exception.”

4. Build a team.

5. Continually share, implement, and improve ideas.

http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/article/0,9171,1531307,00.html

So, five repsonses:

1. If most of your problems are important but not interesting, you’re in the wrong business. On one hand I hear about all of the startups that solved interesting problems and failed because nobody needed the solution. Then I hear from coaches and pundits that it’s important to be passionate about your work. So it seems that the secret is to find work that poses important problems that are usually (but not necessarily always) interesting. I’m fortunate enough to be in a job like that, but I doubt most folks are that lucky.

2. That’s pretty clear and obvious, which means it needs to be restated frequently or it will be overlooked. I would add that some innovations benefit customers by benefiting the organization that serves them.

3. What if you can’t find a champion who’s committed? If the project is important but not necessarily interesting, you might have a hard time finding someone who really cares about it. I guess it depends on how you define “important” versus “interesting”. I don’t know of many organizations that can afford to say, “this important but boring and potentially disastrous project has no champion, so we’re going to scrap it”. Credit Card security audits anyone?

4. It’s always best to build a team. Realistically, you’re often going to be handed a team and told to “make it work”.

5. That depends largely on the environment you’re in. Generally though, I’d agree that organizations that stop sharing ideas are mostly dead.

Screwtape Quote 2

It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.