Drain Bump
Here’s the point that I’m getting to: There is a very useful program called Army Builder that helps miniature gamers build their army lists. It isn’t specific to any one game system so it covers some of the overlap/splintering among the gamers. But the product costs $40 for a one-year license after which you may continue to use the product although you are no longer eligible for updates and feature enhancements. I’ve heard several gamers on forums grumbling about having to drop even the $10-15 per year for a license “bump.” I understand Wolf Lair’s desire to keep piracy down and their explanation for how they’re doing this makes a certain amount of sense. Yet from a gamer’s perspective I can see how $40 (that’s the price of an elite unit in 40K, like five metal Terminators) plus a yearly $15 fee (the price of a metal HQ unit in a blister pack) could feel like a gyp.
Which leads me to what I was thinking which was, why couldn’t Army Builder be done with PHP or Ruby on Rails and Ajax? The interface is pretty simple and the heavy lifting is pretty much done behind the scenes as part of what I’d call definition files specific to each game and/or army, so essentially the hard part would be setting up a flexible framework and then getting someone with a thorough understanding of each game’s (or army’s) rules to build the def files. My thought process is that if the tool itself were built such that the deliverable medium was a web browser, the need for licensing goes away and with something as useful as this the overhead for a webserver/host could be covered with some unobtrusive ads while the development costs can be covered with a simple login and one-time fee of much less than half the cost of AB. I can even envision a situation where the ads cover the cost of the entire product or you could add special features in for small fees like the ability to save your army lists on the site (rather than to a local file) for access later. I even like the AB trial idea of allowing unlimited use for armies less than x points (AB uses a 500 point threshold).
Anybody out there interested in a joint programming project? Better yet, anyone know of someone else who beat me to the punch?
Indigo Romeo Oscar November Sierra Oscar Alpha Papa
I’m getting better about talking to customers on the phone.
That doesn’t mean I like telephones any better than I used to, only that out of necessity I’ve learned to value their immediacy because when my choices are to deal with one customer ringing up fifteen SLAs in a day due to back-and-forth emails or picking up the phone and resolving it in twenty minutes, my stress level protracted over a day versus a painful twenty minutes is simply not worth it.
The one problem I have is that often I get into that weird situation where I’m having to give explicit instructions to enter a series of commands or I need to verify some spelling or other. When accuracy is important, the limitations of verbal communication as a medium for written (or typed) interfaces becomes clear. As a matter of fact, I think that communication in general suffers most obviously whenever the intended effect is to transpose from one to another. People talk often about how it’s hard to convey tone or mood in an email; this seems strange when you consider that authors have been conveying tone and mood via written words for centuries but the distinction is that emails are intended to be spoken conversations by proxy which is where the breakdown occurs.
Anyway, I hear a lot of other techs around here doing the whole “F as in Frank, B as in Boy” routine and I decided quickly that the problem there is no two people use the same “as in” examples so potential disconnects between speaker and listener still happen, even with all the extra effort. “No! B as in Boy, not T as in Toy!” et cetera.
So I decided I was going to learn the military alphabet. It goes as such (and I’m doing this from memory as an exercise):
Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
Indigo
Juliet
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Victor
Whiskey
X-Ray
Yankee
Zulu
As a means of drilling these into my head I’ve been walking around transposing every sequence of letters I can see into these codes. License plates are good for this: I have a habit already of examining the three-letter sequences in the middle of California licenses for short words or acronyms (like initials of people I know or computer/geek terms… I’ve seen SSH, NES, PNG, DRM and EXE before, each time I feel a secret delight that has no rational source). Now I look at them and repeat mentally, “Sierra, Sierra, Hotel; November, Echo, Sierra; Papa, November, Golf” and so on.
Does that make me weird?
Don’t answer that.
The Horror
A couple of months ago I wandered into the breakroom at work. On the table there sat an innocent-looking sheet of paper. The header said, “Girl Scout Cookies Order Form.” I broke out into a nervous sweat. My addiction to the drug most commonly known by its street name, Samoas has been well chronicled. At the time, though, my health habits had been maintaining a steady, strong pace in the realm of “good” for over a year. One box won’t hurt, a voice in my head whispered, not entirely without menace. I decided the voice was right. I’d been good. I deserved a treat.
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