Rants

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.

Since the last post, I have noticed that the Twitter feed has appeared to load a bit faster. Initally, I had turned off the "What am I doing?" block. I did not leave it off for long, just a couple of hours. I missed having it. I did turn it back on, but Twitter is leaving me something to think about. Actually, it is a couple of things. The performance of Twitter is an issue. I know they are making changes, and trying to setup rate limits and what not for their account. I have to assume they are getting slammed pretty much round the clock by people updating and people using things other than SMS messages to either update or receive the feed. I know it took me about 5 mintues to figure out how to post to Twitter using a command line. And then I saw Dave Taylor's script at Linux Journal for doing the same thing. So I used that. It was better. I made some changes to match how I normally do scripts, but the guts are his. How many other people are doing that? Writting scripts to abuse the Twitter (or any other services) api, and pushed the usage model in a completely different direction from where it was designed for. (I love doing stuff like that!) So, here I am, sending tweets from my phone using PIE or SMS (mostly PIE), sending tweets from about 3 different windows apps, sending tweets from a shell script. And then there are all the ways I'm receiving them. I'm not receiving a single SMS message. I found them to be too distracting. The phone sending me an alert means I either have a meeting, a phone call, or something really needs my attention. I prefer to get tweets via a desktop app, a Firefox extention, and my Chumby. I am also using Twitter to feed into at least two other sites that update themselves from the Twitter feeds of their users. Since the last post, I noticed that Twitter was doing something different. They used to limit clients to 60 or 70 calls an hour. With the number of clients I had going, I would hit that once or twice a day. This weekend I started to notice that I was hitting it way more often. They now have a maximum rate of 30 calls an hour. And honestly, I don't see my web site loading any faster. I do think I want to do something different with the Twitter feed. I think I would rather the nanoposts that I send to Twitter show up in the main feed, with the day's tweets grouped together as a single post. I think I saw something like that one someone elses site, but I can't remember which one. Probably a WordPress thing. But being I'm not a fan of WordPress, I'll have to figure something else out. Or just keep going how I'm going. Of course, this all assumes that I'm going to continue on with Twitter. That's another thing I've been thinking about, what the is going on with Twitter? First there is this collective idea that Twitter is having major performance issues. And then I see this in Tweek's feed: Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service. And then Ars Technica runs with it. One has to wonder about companies that don't feel the need to honor their posted terms of service. And I have to assume that these same companies would have no problem at all going after end users that annoy them one way or another. Where's the accountability? Too many times, I've sen these awful click-thru terms of service and licensing agreements that are impossible to read, and is many ways seem to prohibit the exact activity that the product, wesite or service was pitched to perform or provide. And I get that a company or service, in the interest of protecting itself, must occassionally make changes to their terms. But Twitter is on the record as saying they went with their original TOS intentionally, presumably because of Flickr's repuation, a part of which is their enforcement of their TOS. Twitter's now telling people that's not what they meant to do now? They just slammed a package together and, well, mea culpa, there will be changes to make it harder to pin things on them. I like the Ars article's analysis. What is Twitter, a service or a community? Maybe it is time to evaluate either doing something myself, just for me, or looking at services that target the same space as Twitter. I am not using Twitter as anything than a platform for message passing. Honestly, of the now 29 entities following me on Twitter, only 2 are people I actually know. I think even my skills as a programmer would be enough to put something together to accomplish most of how I'm doing with Twitter, even updating at least one of the other sites. And with only two other people who would really be affected (and I'm fairly certain that either of them would really care if I stopped using Twitter) it may be worth going my own way here.

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.

I started using Skype a while ago, when they did the six months of free calling to US phone numbers. It proved to be useful to me, and something that I could use. I called work people. I called family. I called Natalie.
When the deal eventually ran out, I switched to just using Skype to call 800 numbers. That still covered a good number of work things, but a lot of my phone activity is calling people at their desks, and not always on conference lines. And it is sometimes a bother to arrange to get someone to call the house. I'm also more comfortable using the computer headset than I am the phone for long phone calls. And I get better sound over the computer headset than I do over the phone. So I like using the computer for making a lot of my phone calls.
Yesterday, I upgrade to a new version of Skype. And after a day and a half of fighting with it I finally think I got it to stop switching over to the soundcard in the computer and switching away from the USB headset I have here at home.
I guess it was following the directions on how to use a USB headset, 100 times. I eventually just went through each page of the preferences screen and I think I have it doing what I want it to now.
Of course, tomorrow I will more than likely find out that I am wrong and it is still not working. And I'll need it tomorrow, when I work from home.
There is something about Skype that bothers me.
I use it for mostly calling phones, not other Skype people. I actually only have one other Skype user in my contact list. But that was more something funny when I showed everyone Skype installed on my cell phone. Recently the problem I have been having with Skype has been the number of "sexy" whatevers spam chatting me. Usually it's an short meaningless message from somemone with profile picture that has barely covered and contained breasts. And the name is always sexy or sexi or something like that. And if you do happen to respond, it's "My webcam doesn't work with Skype" followed by a link to what could only be an sex site.
I've just been blocking the users when they pop up on my screen.
I have recently set my preferences so that only people on my contact list can chat with me, but I do have to wonder about one point. Are the odds of finding someone that will actually accept and follow the link actually that good?
Sorry. If anyone is out there and does really want to talk over Skype, please contact me via the contact form.

There are still a lot of bounces hitting my inbox today from what appears to be someone spoofing the sysmango.com domain in spam e-mail. I say this because when I look at the headers of legitimate e-mail, the sysmango.com servers are not receiving mail under that name because of how the hosting is setup. There is never mail recevied BY: sysmango.com, only FROM.