Diversions

Tools
Recently I have been trying to use a a couple of new tools to help keep things organzied in my life. Every now and then, I try to go out and see what is out there to help try to help keep my on task and maybe even scavange some hours for myself.
Honestly, it never works, but I try anyway.
Via work, I have Microsoft Outlook, but I don't really like Outlook, and I have tasks and projects that have nothing to do with work. I also like to have more control over things, like possibly hosting my own internal server.
One of the tools that I have been using for quite some time is TimeTTracker MX from R&F Consulting. I first started using this tool about a year into owning my first PDF, an iPAQ handheld. I decided that I needed a tool that would help me keep track of how long I was spending on different tasks and projects at work. The main driver was this was the IT trouble ticket system we were using. A previous job had timers for when one was working on calls. The job at the time did not. I missed it. But I had a PDA, so I went looking for a tool that worked as a stopwatch that let me tag timers by project or activity. TimeTTracker (the version at the time) did most of what I wanted. Subsequent revisions have done more and more. When I bought my VX-6700 phone, this was one of the first things I bought for it.
The only challenge with TimeTTracker is that timers have to be started and stopped. While this isn't a problem on its own, there is one tool in the modern office environment that makes it difficult for your modern knowledge worker: e-mail.
I pretty much keep Outlook open on my work laptop all day long. Even when I am working on something, I have to help keep my eye open for calls from help from the distributed groups I work with. There are hundreds of little things that I'm asked to do or look at that really don't take a lot of time to do, but if I'm working on project A and someone needs me to look at task B and answer a quick question about project C and an IM on thing D, my own timer puts all that into project A. And I'm not going to start and stop the B, C and D timers unless the activity really does take me away from project A. Yes, I know, multitasking is a myth.
One day, in one of the summary e-mails from Technology Review, there was an article that seemed to suggest that there was software out there to help capture time spent on 100's of little things. The tool is called Smart Desktop, currently still in beta. I signed up and quickly got an invite. The tool really does track opening and working on Outlook e-mail and MS office documents. The timeline tracking tool is really useful for trying to figure out what it was I was doing an hour ago, or two hours ago or so.
I just sent the support group for Smart Desktop a quick e-mail just saying Hi. I was just curious how the beta was going. And I was curious if they were doing anything to support their community. They use Drupal for their website, so I used what I know about Drupal. I'm only user 295. One needs a login to download the beta, so I wonder if that means they haven't really gotten a lot of interest in their beta. I do like the tool and may write more about it later.
Another tool I started using, again in beta, is Evernote.
I first saw Evernote when I was first started using OneNote. I had looked for something that worked on more or even all the platforms I use everyday. I like to be able to choose that I'm going to use Linux or even Solaris. I also want to be able to use these tools on my home machine, my work desktop, my linux workstation, my Solaris workstation, Natalie's and the boys' machines. (Last count I was running about 10 machines at home.)
Evernote was something that did things like OneNote, but it had a web component, as well as a desktop component, at least on Windows. I think they were talking about the future of the product and it was pay for. I wasn't looking for something pay for at that point, so I moved on.
I got back to Evernote recently, just while their beta/preview was getting near wrapped up. And I am trying to use it. It does really nice screenshots. It let's me capture data using the camera on my phone. And it lets me categorize things into different notebooks. There is also an e-mail address that Evernote hosts that lets me send things right to my notebook, even when I am just on my phone. More on this later.
I'm kind of running out of steam, so I might just stop here before I get into the next set of tools, including Jott and OSAF Chander.

I have been meaning to post something for the last several days. Everyone is away, and I really didn't think I would have had any trouble posting about some of the tools that I have been trying to use at home and work to try to keep better track of where I am spending my time, and potentially wasting it.
This isn't that post.
This is about a few of the things where I know I have been wasting my time.
I tried watching TV again this week. For the most part, I did not find anything worth watching. I understand that we are into the summer rerun season, but being I really didn't watch any of it the first time around, there should have been something compelling or at least interesting. Nada.
I did watch a couple of movies via Netflix. I tend to intentionally weirder titles when Natalie's not here. Mostly this is done to not have to deal with only having 4 movies at a time from Netflix and there being things that she wants to watch in queue behind oddball things that I just happen to pull out of thin air using some really obscure movies selection process that I do not think even I understand completely enough to understand how it works.
The two movies that made it through that selection were "Sex and Death 101" and "Chaos Theory".
Neither were what I expected them to be. Both were actually better as the quirky character stories they were. But I'm not really in the mood to write reviews, so lets move along.
I also spent some time dealing with the question of if I want to spend any more time in any of the available Massively Multiplayer Online Games. I really have not gotten into anything since Myst Online was canceled. And I still do not really know how I feel about the recent announcement that Myst Online may be coming back in another form via Cyanworlds's MORE project--Myst Online: Restoration Experiment. I don't know yet. I'm still thinking about what this means.
When MORE starts, it is going to be a very different game from what was hosted by GameTap. At this point, we know that there will not be any new content from Cyan, initially or possibly ever. I understand this. The question is how quickly can the community develop content for the game? How much of that content will be compelling? How much of that will tell its stories?
I have done some thinking about why MOUL did not meet my expectations. I have also been looking at a few other games trying to see if they do things any better.
MOUL did not meet my expectations because it couldn't. It just flat out couldn't. It was a combination of the state of the community, the state of Cyan and the methodology of presentation. And there is more. Some of these issues I did not realize until I did start into other games.
A while back I tried Matrix Online. The experiment was a failure. While I knew people who were playing, I unfortunately picked a time when they were either not able or willing to get into MxO and introduce me to the community. And this is a community where one either needs to decide to play alone or get an introduction. That may not be true, but it is my experience.
There were some things I did like about MxO. The very flexible skill system was something I think more games should have. That skill system allowed anyone who felt like investing the time to build a single character down any and all of the available paths. And that made it impossible to build an unplayable character, or completely dead ended a character due to a bad choice on build out. And I liked the setting of the Matrix movies. It is just a shame that the community seemed to have reached a point where it setteled. And the game itself has not seemed to evolve. As a new character, I should have entered the game and quickly found myself involved in the current state of the game, not where it was 2 years ago. With the community seemingly stagnated, I had no interest in continuing past the demo.
I did pickup GuildWars, but that just doesn't feel compelling. All of the missions just feel way too cookiecutter. And I have some issues with how the community feels distracted. I guess this has to do with the fact that most of the game occurs away from the noob areas. I also am a little bothered that at level 20 a player either stops or moves into the dedicated PVP environment.
I also recently tried EverQuest II (EQ2). People at work play it. People at work seem a little addicted to it. I really just don't feel like I'm getting into it.
The noob area is fine, but the missions are obviously cookie cutter. I haven't had much experience with the community, as the people I know cannot get their existing characters into the noob area. I also find that character creation a bit too complicated. I think there may be too many races and classes and they are put together in difficult to understand ways. And having started 4 different characters, there just doesn't seem to be much along the lines of trying to get players into the history or story of the setting. Considering there really isn't an external frame of reference, this is an issue for me.
The question I still need to answer is what AM I looking for?
I really want a compelling story. I also want to know that the story is potentially going to be different for each character, or at least have more than just a succeed and failed outcomes. It would be nice if the various missions had decision points in them that allow characters to experience one of several potential outcomes, some successful, so not so much.
I would also to see that extend into the main branch of the game. And in a PvP environment, should one be appropriate to the setting, have dynamically generated missions that put players against one another. Let me explain that one a bit.
Let's assume that we are in a game with groups or factions that are enemies. And that there are places in the game where these groups have to interact with one another. As players from one side take missions or quests in this area, have players from the other side be offered missions and quests to counter, interfere or just plain be the spanner thrown into the gearbox of the mission for the opposing players.
I would also like to see sets or arcs of missions and quests where there is real staged conflict between members of opposing factions. I would see this as better than a bunch of cookie cutter missions that absolutely everyone playing the game gets to play later.
As you can see, I am having a hard time finding a game that matches how I want to play.
I guess I'll stop here, for now.

I jokingly added 16 hours to an estimate under the line heading of coffee and recovery referencing how long it would take for us to actually deal with the project being estimated after it was done.

I was asked to justify coffee in the estimate.

This is what I came up with.

Completely
Organized
Funded
Functional
Endorsed
Executed

Think that's too much of a stretch?

Just a bunch of links I sent to Natalie this morning:

(08:22:55 AM) ButchLebo: http://www.apple.com/trailers/newline/journeytothecenteroftheearth/trailer4/
(09:02:00 AM) ButchLebo: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/306632596/robot-cupcakes.html
(09:04:02 AM) ButchLebo: http://riumplus.livejournal.com/141863.html
(09:04:31 AM) ButchLebo: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/306632599/steampunk-dalek-1.html
(09:05:35 AM) ButchLebo: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CourierTimesNews/~3/306745590/111-06072008-1545599.html
(09:07:25 AM) ButchLebo: http://torenatkinson.deviantart.com/art/Where-the-Great-Old-Ones-Are-20882194
 

It is old news to anyone that was paying attention that GameTap is shutting down Myst Online: Uru Live on 10 April.
There have been plenty of people involved with either the Myst community or the game industry and media who have already written about why Myst failed as an MMO, twice. The conversations have gone everywhere from "the world was not ready for a game like Myst" to "Cyanworlds was not ready to present Myst."
The short version, or at least the most official one that the community received was that the game just did not attract enough players and GameTap could no longer justify having the game.
In all honesty, the game is already shutdown. While the servers are still up and accepting connections, there has been no new content since the end of the last episode, late last year.
With the closing of Myst Online, I find that I do not have an online game to play. Several weeks ago, I started looking at what other games had to offer. I have tried to talk to people I know who do play various games about their experiences in their current game of choice (or games, as the case may be). I am shopping around and looking.
One part of this, at the end of February, I started playing the trials of a couple of games.
At the end of the demo for Myst Online, back when it was first available (then just known as Uru: Ages Beyond Myst and Uru Live), about an hour, I was hooked. I could not wait for the beta to be over, and the game to open. (You can see how clueless I was about how games like this actually work). I figured that if what become Myst Oneline could hook me in under an hour, then a mature MMO should be able to do the same thing in a couple of days to a couple of weeks.
So I started. The first game up was The Matrix Online.
I actually have some idea about MxO. I work with some people who have been playing the game since its begining. Now, MxO does not actually have a trial. I figured out how to get into one by poking around the Sony Online Entertainment site. This may be important. The lack of an active trail period means that the only people playing MxO are people paying for MxO. And that means the commuity in the game may not actually be used to new people showing up and just learning the game.
There were a lot of things I liked about MxO. The skills and abilities system seems really very flexible. It seems that in other games, it is possible to build out a character in such a way that the character is functionally unplayable. MxO does not have that problem, as a player can always go back and just build or buy the abilities they want, and not load the abilities that they want, even if they bought them. This seems interesting, in that any character can possibly fulfill any any for any purpose. It is also possible to build a hybrid character that mixes abilities from more than one domain. So, no really rigid silos.
As I know people who are passionate about their characters in the game, I have seen what the community in the game can do, at its best and worst. I did not tell them I was going to try the game. I tend to play on my own, and honestly, it bothers me to have to rely on others for my own entertainment.
Playing on my own, I really did not get a good view of the community. In fact, when the people I know did find out I was trying the game, they suggested I stay away from certain areas. This was not because the game was too hard there. It was because the people I would find there would not really be the kind who I would want to deal with. Too bad that this is the only area in the game where I actually ran into groups of any size.
Short version, the MxO community may have some really stong people playing, but I didn't meet any of them. If the beginner areas of the game are populated with high level people (at the cap) who seem to have nothing better to do than to sit around one spot in the game and cyber all day, and that's what a new person sees, I'm sorry. And the parts of the story that new characters are exposed to are from the begining of the game's run, not the current state. And after I was told there "wasn't anything to do until level 50," I came to terms that no matter how much I liked the movies and things built up around them setting, I was much happier with MxO not ever having played it.
Would my experiences have been different if I had been shown around by my coworkers? Or even just dropped their names with the groups I did deal with? Maybe. But I did not want to play in a game where I was only going to be taken seriously in relation to an in-game celebrity or really popular person.
I only played 10 days of the 14 day trial I had managed. On the 10th day, there was an update to the game (the release of the Dataminer area) that prevented me from playing the last four days. Seems fitting. Even the game, itself, did not want me involved.
I had Good Friday off. I have all this coming week off. I figured I would try at least one more game trial. Friday I started trying Eve Online. Today I decided I was not going to continue with the trial.
I have been a little concerned about Eve Online since hearing about an incident where a member of the game's team had the way Myst did. I want to be able to escape and loose myself in the story of the game, not just mash buttons and watch the game do things.
To be honest, Myst Online: Uru Live did not deliver what I was looking for either. While I was much more invested in Myst than I was or will be for any game that I am may try, the game was lacking a cohesive story. There is another post in that idea. This one is long enough.
If anyone is actually reading this, and knows of any games that have trials that might suit me, please try to get in contact with me and suggest them.