Month: May 2008

Simple one this time, inspired by 4 cricketers being hit on the head in the games last weekend. They’re all ok, although one of them lost a few teeth.

(I’ve had my airbrush out to get rid of the worst of the wrinkles in my bedsheet !)

Sounds like a satisfying weekend. the ‘Tin Man’ sounds interesting, usually I don’t go much for sci-fi but you made this sound good.

Good luck in all that dust. Wear a mask 😉

After a frenetic Friday getting some finance figures done, I’ve had 4 days all my own. It’s consisted of :

Watching England pull off a surprise win in the Test Match – Yey !
Marathon World of Warcraft sessions
Seeing the satellite pic break up due to storm interference
And catching Tin Man

I’m just past a third of the way through Tin Man, it’s one of the new collection of mini-series that have been hitting Sci-Fi channel recently. They’ll take a story that’s been done before, like Dune, Earthsea and now Wizard of Oz and redo (I’m wary about the made up buzz word re-imagine) it. The producers take advantage of more up to date production techniques, better effects and apparently bigger budgets and apply them to telling the old stories.

Now it’s the turn of Wizard of Oz, this time around switched around a little. The title is Tin Man and we meet him pretty early on in the shape of Neal McDonough who had the lead role in Medical Investigation as well as playing the part of 1st Lt Buck Compton in Band of Brothers. He’s a good actor who I keep an eye out for. Back to Tin Man – the old favourites are all there, in slightly different forms. Lol – Glitch, taking the part of Scarecrow, just expressed a fear of scarecrows. That’s the pattern for the new productions, they take the same basic story but add something new to it. I like ’em.

Back to Tin Man, I’m midway through the second episode of three and it’s looking good for something to be added to the dvd wish list later on today. I’m going to try and avoid playing Warcraft today, as I’ve been doing what could only be described as “Benders” on it over the weekend. The stage my new main character is at the moment involves hitting an area called Stranglethorn Vale in a big way. It’s a sizable area that keep a character happy for quite some time. Which is something everyone knows, so you get higher level characters coming in to bully the people who are just trying to level. Unless you start at midnight and go on until 6am. Plays hell with the sleeping patterns but it lets you plow thorugh without too much molestation 🙂

I’m not quite sure what I think of doing the mammoth WoW sessions. It’s still the best game I’ve played and it happily runs on my main PC. Eve runs well but it’s a drop dead boring game to play, plus its servers can’t cope with the fleet battles. The new kid on the block, Age of Conan, looks promising but early reports suggest it should still be in beta testing. Plus it has insane hardware requirements.

I suspect my graphics card would probably melt if I threw AoC at it, I get the feeling it’s suffered a fan failure which will be the second fan failure I’ve had. The hardware monitoring is telling me that it idles at 70 degrees C and has been hitting 105-110 C when pushed. Which is rather too hot for any electronic gubbins and it about 30 degrees above what it was when I got the card. It still happily runs WoW, Settlers IV and Moo2 though, so I’m not quite switching it for my older spare just yet.

Back to work tomorrow and to see how the cyclone is going with that finance stuff. We’ve been talking about what will happen when the dust settles, so we’re in the period when all that dust is up in the air. I have a plan for tomorrow’s Wordless Wednesday pic – inspired by all the cricketers who got hit on the helmets in the 2 Tests that have been going on. Looks like no lasting problems for 3 of the 4 but I’m concerned about the New Zealander Daniel Flynn. He got hit full on the grill of his helmet, which deformed under the impact allowing the ball to hit him in the mouth. He’s lost a couple of teeth and didn’t take any further part in the match. He needs to get back on the horse as soon he possibly can, because those psychological effects can be devastating if you back away too much. I hope he makes it.

Actually – “rather disappointed” is definitely a huge understatement.

The following is cut from what’s left of the Mercs forums (full text on link)

So no-one came forward to take on the mantle and continue the traditions of the Mercenaries and people instead looked for other homes. I suppose I can’t blame you, we had enough troubles trying to maintain progress and losing a large number of people meant if you wanted to continue you were bound to look elsewhere.

Because of this I have finally closed down the Mercs. The guild still exists as a one character guild purely because I did not want the name to be used for someone elses guild. When I say closed down, I mean for now closed down unless the same players decide to restart it.

What makes me most angry about this statement (and the rest of it) is that for the last couple of months after a fair few people left Mercs, I’d been telling people on the now dead forum that they could retire their characters (as I have done with Iceangel) and they’d retain the treasured “Mercenaries of Darkness” guild tag. It would be their’s, they’d earned it and had the right to keep it.

What I wasn’t expecting was a GM who’d had a lot to do with the collapse of a guild/organisation that I started 3 years ago to rip up those promises and make them utterly worthless by effectively disbanding the guild. Maybe we made a mistake 2 and a half years ago by entrusting the GM job to this particular person ? A person who’s main consistent trait has been to avoid management of the issues that arose within the guild, which eventually led to its collapse.

Very disappointed at seeing that message on the old Mercs site – especially as the author of it has continued his old pattern of not asking people before actually doing something rash. That’s one sad thing about this – whenever action was taken by that GM, it was out of the blue because of how out of character it was for there to actually be any action.

Where am I now with Warcraft ? Apart from being rather disappointed and not a little bit angry about that Mercenaries Of Darkness tag being taken away, I’m quite happily playing away at my own pace on a new server. I’m in a small guild having been introduced by a very good friend from university. They’re a good bunch and I’m enjoying being around them. It’s a relaxed feeling and their leadership is active. Quite a contrast to the Mercs, who were dominated by progress fixated people who didn’t actually want to organise anything.

I’m rapidly closing in on my rapid levelling record and should quite handily smash it. I’m not raiding with the new guild yet but that should add new interest and challenge when I get there. New character, new role, new people. Looking forward to it 🙂

My Eve subs have been cancelled as it’s still a highly boring game to actually play, plus it looks like the neighbourhood has gone downhill with an old name being invited into the alliance. Plus Eve’s main draw is the player owned territory with the mechanics involved in that territory changing hands being broken due to the game hardware not being able to handle the numbers involved. Anything to do with The Maelstrom server in Warcraft just makes me angry, although I still keep an eye on VR cos they’re a good bunch.

So I’m now on another server and I’m enjoying my time there. Enough to be crash levelling one character and most likely some more 🙂

It’s funny…I can’t listen to music when I read. In fact, my favorite place to listen to music is in my car, close second is while playing cards or board games with friends.

Hope you’re enjoying your weekend, thanks for playing!

Another Friday Fill-ins 🙂 I don’t always get around to doing one of these and they’re always fun to do. For more, have a peek at Janet’s site here.

1. On my laziest day I like to put the music on and read, read, read !
2. Solving problems makes me feel like I’m being productive.
3. I love little waves and big smiles, especially when they’re from someone pretty 🙂.
4. This summer I want to actually play in a game of cricket for a change !
5. Curiosity on whether I could maintain it and a need to talk a few things through made me start my blog.
6. Red cricket balls are what the game should be played with and orange swingypractice balls are just cheating.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to just plain chill out, tomorrow my plans include watching every single ball in the cricket and Sunday, I want to catch the baseball game cos I have Monday off !

The balls thing is a cricket practice thing – there’s special ones made differently, in order to amplify whatever movement the ball might made through the air. Cricket balls can move when they bounce (because the seam makes them not round) but will also move left or right when going through the air. It needs the players looking after the ball in the right way – it’s actually possible to change a ball that goes arrow straight into one that will curve inside about an hour’s practice.

However, when coaches are trying to teach swing, they’ll use these special practice balls which go all over the place. I don’t like them because they actually swing too much, I don’t think the person being taught learns the technique and control. They certainly don’t learn how to look after the ball.

Anyway – that’s me poking holes in coaches taking shortcuts that lead to incomplete knowledge transfer. Time to get back to chilling out with cricket watching, book, telly and marathon World of Warcraft sessions 🙂

I’m yet to do a Teambuilding day….I quite like the idea of one though….

[chuckle] Part of it is trying to put a brave face on seeing what’s going to be happening in the future and knowing you won’t have that much influence on it.

Strange how I’m relatively ok with alterations in what I do at work but almost dead set against it with my habits at home … I really need to change some of the home habits but inertia keeps me in the same pattern.

I really admire your positive take on team building and your easy acceptance of the realities of having to do more with less.

I went through many re-structures and I can’t say I always handled it well.

Best of luck.

We had a day out of the office today, doing a bit of teambuilding.

The organisation I work for is going through quite a broad array of change at the moment, as we try and improve the way we do things. (Translation – doing more with less) For my area of interest, that means our team is both growing and shrinking. Slightly less people but more things to look after. Which, when you get past the “less people” thing, is kinda interesting because there are new toys in the sandpit. And I have a connecting interest in some of those toys.

I’m deliberately being vague there in saying exactly who I work for, as I have a few blogfriends who also work on the same site who don’t want to make an issue of who they work for. So I just treat them here as Just Another Employer. Which is what they are 🙂 Even if the rules are a little different. But then – what company, department, partnership, army, surgery, trust, charity has the same rules as another.

Bah – digressing …

Team building is one of those exercises where everyone disappears off to a meeting place, usually a hotel, for some serious brianstorming. (Yep – we have a couple of Brians and they do come up with good ideas). It’s a good opportunity to get away from the phone and email distractions and see if we can figure out better ways of working. Most of the time that means poking at people outside the team but the best time is spent in figuring out what you could do better.

A key lesson in life is : “You are not perfect. You can always improve.” I could probably Google that and attribute the quote to someone but it’s so generic that if it is attributed to someone, then the person was probably trying to pass themself off as a Deep Thinker Guru …

For the sportsperson, they can improve their skill.
The public speaker can understand their audience better.
The engineer can figure out ways to pass on their ideas more clearly.
The station announcer can speak more clearly.
The repairman can turn up on time.
Drivers can learn a little consideration for their fellow road users.
And someone upstairs can make the sun shine on Day 1 of the First Test.

(ok – maybe we’re pushing it on that last one!)

I’ve rambled up top without really saying anything – Teambuilding is often greeted with “Groan – gonna be really boring.” Which really translates to “Oo eck – I may have to think outside my comfort zone.” Interesting day out of the office, although it distracts away from a highly essential piece of work we’re having to do in an insanely short time scale.