DocSavag's The Fortress of Solitude

Star Trek Online Goes to Open Beta

2010-01-12T11:19:00.008-05:00

Over the past few weeks I have been privileged to participate in the Closed Beta of Start Trek Online (STO). It was a dream come true for me because I've been following the progress of this MMO since it was first announced with another publisher a lifetime ago.

Today the game goes to Open Beta in preparation for a launch on February 2nd and the NDA has been dropped allowing me to post about my experiences with the game for the first time publicly.

Although I am the first to admit that the game is far from perfect I want to say upfront that I consider it a very fun game with lots of future potential. I had fun during the closed beta even with some of the frustrations that are inherent for MMO beta tests. The game has come a long way even in the few weeks I've been involved with it. The development team has been responsive to the findings of the testers and have made corrections to game play in areas where the game wasn't meeting expectations.

The game starts out with a bang as you are interrupted in your relaxation hours in the mess hall and pressed into service to help out in an emergency.

You quickly end up at the helm of you ship as the most senior officer left alive after the attach and are thrust into the world of starship command. And ultimately in an fight with an iconic Star Trek enemy.

From there you move out into the galaxy taking receiving periodic missions from StarFleet Command and otherwise picking up patrol missions to various sectors or exploring star clusters of unknown worlds. You find yourself frequently in combat in a galaxy which is in conflict but you find time for the occasional diplomatic mission or exploration mission as well.

The game includes both a very robust and exciting space combat engine and a very fun ground combat system as well. You can go it alone for most of the missions in the game if you wish but my experience is that almost all of the missions are a lot more fun with other players. The missions and patrols scale to the group you are in. In addition there are massive group actions called Fleet Missions which are essentially large instances where multiple players work together to achieve a goal.

You ship includes slots of Bridge Officers which extend your abilities and assist you on away missions. Bridge Officers can be trained with new skills by players who have acquired the skills to train new commands or by other Bridge Officers who will train your officer and then return to StarFleet Command for further assignment.

As you gain experience in the game you eventually get promoted and are eligible to command larger and more powerful ships. Your Bridge Officers can transfer with you and you can promote them provided they have the required experience. Beyond your first starter ship you choose between three different types of ships Cruiser, Escort, or Science. The differences in ships amount to how many Bridge Officers of each type (Engineering, Science, Tactical) you have and the weapons slots and maneuverability of the ship. You are allocated on new ship with each rank promotion but can acquire others as well if you wish.

There are some elements that aren't in the game that I wish were there. You can't explore much of your ship yet only the bridge and it doesn't really have a function beyond sightseeing and social gathering. The crafting system is very rough and needs to be fleshed out more. The game is far more combat centric than I think most players wished though the combat is fun. Ultimately though the building blocks for a great Star Trek MMO are there and that is really all I had hoped for.

Bittersweet Reunion

2009-12-14T19:54:00.002-05:00

On Sunday I made the 150 mile trip to my father's hometown for his family's Christmas celebration. This is the second one I've attended since his death in 2008. For some reason this trip hit me harder than the one before. I guess it was because my mother, in ill heath herself, wasn't able to make the trip this year and for the first time in my life my wife and I made that long trek alone.

My wife and I spent nearly an hour before the trip working out an alternate route than the traditional one my parents taught us all those years. My wife's motivation for that was to try to speed up the trip. Deep down I think I was more interested in changing the trip for emotional reasons.

The trip itself was good, the time went by pretty quickly and we did get there faster using the route we selected. The gathering is in what my Aunt and Uncle call their "little farmhouse" which is a 3 bed room house that has been expanded and renovated over the many years they have lived there. I'm not sure I would call it little but having 60+ people in it sure makes it feel small.

It was good to see everyone again. Many of the younger relatives I don't even recognize any more. I see them as kids running around the front yard playing with silly string instead of the young adults they now are, driving fast cars and smoking.

Seeing my grandmother was tough for me. I can't see her and not think about my dad, especially this trip because she had called me several weeks ago to ask permission to buy my dad a headstone. I hadn't had the time to get to this task with everything we've been through with my mother over the past year and I was grateful that she wanted to do this, but seeing her now just makes me think about it and she hits me hard with a phrase about the headstone, "It's the last thing I'll ever be able to do for him."

The recently added routine of giving everyone a t-shirt for Christmas occurs at the end of the gift giving ritual. Everyone gets a shirt with the family name on the front and their name and the number representing the order in which they entered into the family (by birth, marriage, etc). They have a shirt for my dad. This causes my wife to have to leave the room to get control of her emotions and I stand very still trying to hold back the emotional outburst that struggles to stay under control. In the end I mostly succeed and it is time for the last challenge of the weeknd..visiting my father's gravesite and viewing the new headstone.

The trip out there from my Aunt's house is about 20 minutes and it takes forever. I've only driven out there once before myself and someone was driving in front of us that day. We find it using two different GPS systems and view the new headstone. For some reason my grandmother's words and the t-shirt are more powerful. I feel more at peace here than in that farmh house surrounded by family.

All in all the trip was enjoyable, it was good to see everyone again and making the first of probalby many more trips by ourselves was kind of a coming of age experience. My emotions though are still a jumble in a way they haven't been in a while. All of it just brought back so many memories of my parents and those trips I made as a child.

The Death of Journalism

2009-11-06T13:12:00.002-05:00

Watching the news coverage last night of the tragic events at Fort Hood, I couldn't help but be more horrified and offended at the lazy rumormongering that passes for journalism these days.

I watched as CNN spent massive amounts of time and energy with their digital map software showing the area involved and making useless estimats of the parking lot size and the size of the buildings and how close they were to other things only to find out hours later they were focused on the wrong building...hours after they discovered that I saw the same building used as a background shot for the story.

I listened as a senator stated someone had told her the victims were targeted specifically and then heard multiple outlets report that as if it were a fact.

A panel spent the better part of a half hour discussing the dangerous stress levels created in our military by multiple deployments of serivcemen overseas before one of them finally pointed out that we already knew that this particular suspect had never been deployed before. A few minutes later they returned the the irrelevant topic anyway.

I saw another anchor question some minor fact about the schooling of the suspect as if it were materially important that he had never heard of the school while at the same time mindlessly repeating more materially important rumors as if they were established facts.

I was also disturbed by the fact that the cable outlets just kept on with their regular programming hosts and weaved the story into their opinion shows instead of actually covering the story with news anchors like real news.

All in all I was terrified of what media in this country has become. Forget bias, the issue is simply laziness. Its far easier to just repeat what you've heard on some other network as fact than do your own research.

Digital Books: At the Tipping Point

2009-08-05T14:07:00.001-04:00

Reading a recent article about the new Sony Ebook device I couldn't help think that we are almost to the tipping point in Digital Publishing where it becomes mainstream instead of niche.

For this to truly happen consumers have to pressure publishers and retailers to agree on a universal format and universal portability. Having to buy a device that costs several hundred dollars is bad enough. Having that choice limit your selection of titles is worse.

Imagine if buying a Sony Blu-Ray player meant would could only buy Blu-Ray discs sold by Best Buy and buying a Phillips Blu-Ray player limited your choices to only those sold by Amazon.Com. That would be nonsensical. It is no less nonsensical when the product is books and magazines rather than movies and tv shows.

The recent HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray wars were incredibly expensive for consumers and retailers and delayed the move forward to high definition video for a couple of years while the battle played out.

Content should not be a captive to hardware. The formats of these books are all relatively similar any way and the only thing that has to happen is for a group to come up with a common rights management scheme that everyone can adopt.

If DVD players can all agree on a standard platform and management scheme so can ebook readers. It is up to the consumers to demand that they work toward this goal.

Star Trek v2.0

2009-05-08T13:26:00.001-04:00

I have to admit that I approached this film with great trepidation. The idea sounded way too much like Harve Bennet's Star Fleet Academy idea from years ago. It also smacked of "muppet babies" to me where you take an established set of characters and dumb them down for a younger audience.

I started to hear buzz though that it was much more than that. The clincher for me was reading the prequel graphic mini-series Countdown which laid out the back-story for the future altering events that take place at the opening of the film. The plot was well written in this piece and felt like Star Trek to me.

So last night my wife and I saw the film in IMAX. I have to say that I enjoyed it a lot even though there are a number of things that nag at me as a lifelong Star Trek fan. Changes that occur in the film that just make this version dramatically different from the series I grew up with in the 70’s (I was way to young to have watched them in the 60s).

The movie was very entertaining though, and I found myself liking this story and these characters all over again. Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and especially Karl Urban make Kirk, Spock, and McCoy come alive again for the first time since the end of the original series, even more so than the original actors were able to do for me in the movie era.

The film is action packed, and the special effects are top of the line and the sets were beautiful.

There are still a few things that bother me about the film. One of them involves Uhura and another character that just doesn't work for me, but overall it is an excellent reboot of the series and I am looking forward to seeing these characters again in a film that doesn't have to spend so much time setting everything up and can jump right into the action.

I would hate to see worst and dimmest!

2009-03-16T15:49:00.001-04:00

"[...]we cannot attract and retain the best and brightest talent to lead and staff the AIG businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of the American taxpayers — if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury." -- AIG Chairman and CEO Edward Liddy in a letter to Treasury Secretary Geithner.

AIG is seriously telling us that the best and the brightest are employed by AIG? The financial services division had dragged AIG down to the point of losing more than $60 billion dollars in a single quarter. How much would they have lost if they didn't pay millions of dollars in retention bonuses for the "best and the brightest?"

Rule of Law

2009-01-21T21:08:00.001-05:00

So just one day after President Obama reminded us that the Constitution was set forth by our Founding Fathers to protect the rights of man and the rule of Law we have United States Senators who are holding up the confirmation of the next Attorney General of the United States because they want him to promise not to prosecute people who might have committed a crime? Is this really what they believe is in the best interests of their states and the country? Trying to lobby the next head of the Justice Department to NOT follow the law?

And He Gets it on Day 1

2009-01-20T13:10:00.004-05:00

Following up on my rant against former President Bush's misunderstanding of his task as President of the United States I give you a quote from President Obama from his inaugural address:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. -Barack Obama 1/20/2009

He gets it. Our Founding Fathers didn't craft our Constitution to apply only when things were going well. Like my marriage vows the rule of law applies in good times and in bad. We cannot jettison our ideals in the face of adversity.

He Still Doesn't Get it...

2009-01-14T09:56:00.001-05:00

After nearly 8 years in office, most of it after the world changing events of 911, President George W. Bush still doesn't understand his responsibilities. In a recent interview he insisted again that "The most important job I have had -- and the most important job the next president is going to have -- is to protect the American people from another attack,"

His complete disregard for his real top priority to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" has been evident constantly throughout his administration. One cannot defend the Constitution by violating it. Protecting the lives of American Citizens around the world is an important job of the government of the United States. It is not however the top priority. What good is life without liberty? We cannot sacrifice the very foundation that others have died to protect in the name of preventing criminals from attacking us. The loss of life is always a tragedy. But without liberty you have a pale imitation of what life is about.

The founders didn't include the words to be spoken by the President upon taking office by accident. They didn't intend for the president to ignore them as his primary responsibility.

We have countless law enforcement officials, intelligence organizations, diplomatic corps, and military personnel who do have very important responsibilities to protect us from harm. The President, while trying to keep us as safe as possible, must answer to a higher standard. He must put the law before individuals. He cannot sacrifice our Constitution in order to save lives. As cold and harsh as it sounds it cannot be any other way for the Constitution to have any meaning. If we give up our beliefs for safety we have lost already.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Benjamin Franklin 1755

"All isn't well with the world"

2008-11-18T11:20:00.001-05:00

I recently read Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." This dystopian story is about a world where books are outlawed and firemen burn books instead of putting out fires. It has often been misinterpreted to be a book about government censorship. Its real message is that modern media simplifies complex topics to the point of making them meaningless.

In the story Shakespeare is reduced down to a one page summary in order to hold the attention of the audience. This example is chilling considering the number of 3-5 minute recap shows that are cropping up everywhere on regular TV these days. If you can show me everything that I should know about a 44 minute episode of "The Shield" in 3 minutes why did you bloat it to 44 minutes in the first place? (The cynical answer is advertising revenue but thats for a different rant)

I appreciate the "previously on.." recaps at the beginning of a show because they don't attempt to show you everything that has happened they are meant to give upcoming events in the story context that otherwise would have to be done with boring exposition. Recapping every episode in a few minutes though is dangerously close to the nightmare that Bradbury envisioned with complex and vivid dramatic works reduced to lifeless bits of imagery.

In Defense of Early Voting

2008-11-02T10:33:00.002-05:00

I watched a video today of Conservative Commentator Fred Barnes suggesting that Early Voting had to be stopped.

His rationale seems to be that if you vote early you might miss out on important information that would change your mind at the last minute. He gives as examples The Reagan-Carter debate one week before the election and the 2004 last weekend disclosure of G.W. Bush's DUI arrest.

It is hard to take this seriously. DUI was a non issue as it should have been. The Debates are a different story and I would certainly advise anyone who still had doubts as to who to vote for to wait until the last possible moment or until they have made up their mind. I wouldn't however suggest that they should just keep waiting until the last moment in case someting comes up. What if it comes up at 9pm on Election night and you've already voted? What if some amazing relavation comes out on Wednesday afternoon? The October surprise syndrome is one of the most destrutive trends in national politics. We have been watching these two candidates for nearly 2 years now. If you don't know enough to pick one of them by all means wait another 3 days. If however you have already seen what you need to see, go and vote if your state allows early voting. The more people who vote early the less issues there will be with lines and issues on election day.

W.

2008-10-18T09:08:00.001-04:00

My wife and went to see Oliver Stone's new film W. last night. I left feeling both angry and sad.

The film portrays our 43rd President in a way that can only make you feel sorry for him. He is a product of his upbringing and the environment around him. He is what he is. The fault for his being in a position he never should have been in. A position he was never really qualified to be in is not his fault, it’s our fault as voters and citizens because we put him there.

I personally voted against W. twice but I left the movie thinking that simply voting against him wasn't good enough. I should have done more. I should have become more active in efforts to prevent the last eight years.

In addition, I bought into the fear campaign that got us into the Iraq War. Even as I read reasoned and intelligent things by people who were warning me that I was being duped I held on to the idea that certainly no one at the highest level of our government was irresponsible enough to manufacture such a grave and terrifying threat to our nation. They duped me just as they set out to do, just as they did many other citizens.

The movie itself is entertaining and Josh Brolin was apparently born to portray W. Richard Dreyfuss nails Dick Cheney as well. Even when he isn't speaking his character roams the screen casting a shadow on the room he is in. I felt that James Cromwell did a very decent job of walking in the shoes of the Senior Bush as well. About the only portrayal I would take issue with is Thandie Newton's Condi Rice. I think she spent too much time working on her physical mannerisms and, as a result, overplayed them. She is distracting at times on the screen.

Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell was a powerful role. I left the theater reminded that he should have made a different decision about running for President when he was at the height of his popularity a few years ago. The world would be a different place today.

I had seen several interviews by Oliver Stone prior to going to see the film and the comment he made that spoke to me afterwards more than any other was his illustrating the difference between empathy and sympathy. I left the movie feeling empathetic towards W. I felt I better connected with why he is who he is. But I wasn't overly sympathetic for his actions. I was even less sympathetic for an electorate who is far too easily distracted from reality by the smoke and mirrors of political campaigns.

Anniversary of Sadness

2008-10-07T08:59:00.001-04:00

As I was preparing to go by the hospital to visit my mother this morning and then go on to work my Motorola Q9m popped up today's reminders. One of the was my mom's wedding anniversary. This would normally be a celebratory event or at least a benign one. Today however its very sad because it is the first anniversary since my dad's passing a little over a month ago.

For some reason its also a reminder of just how bad the last five months have been. Since June my life has been interruped by a shoulder injury which had me flat on my back for two weeks, my mom's broken leg which had her in the hospital for nearly 2 weeks followed by another two months of rehab, my father's stroke on the day my mother found out her leg wasn't healing and had to be amputated, my father's death 3 days later, my mother's amputation after a month’s wait, a new nursing home for rehab, and now my mother back in the hospital for congestive heart failure.

If you wrote a script like that for a Hollywood drama they would tell you to go back and try writing something a little more believable and less melodramatic. Along the way it’s been months since my wife and I could relax without wondering if the phone was going to ring with some new bad news. And more than a month since we could go a whole day without visiting either a hospital or a nursing facililty

I'm not sure what the message in all this is, at this point I'm too emotionally exhausted to actually try to think about the message. I'm too busy waiting for another shoe to drop.

Change, Baby, Change!

2008-09-16T22:48:00.002-04:00

My friends and family will tell you that I am very interested in politics. Mainly I think because I love to argue and tell people what I think. Most of them would probably be surprised to know that I have never contributed to a political campaign.

I have thought about it before and while I have been very passionate about candidates in the 24 years since I have been eligible to vote (and I've voted in every Presidential Election since I turned 18). I never actually made the decision to become involved financially in a campaign. Until a few days ago.

Like many people I have been unhappy with the way things have turned out these past 8 years and especially the last 4. I'm incredibly angry at what I have seen as a disrespect for the American people and the laws that make us who we are. The current administration I feel has let us down.

So several weeks ago after watching both conventions I decided to contribute modestly to the campaign of Barack Obama. For me there really was no other choice. I cannot buy into the idea that John McCain is actually going to change the direction we are going as a country. I don't believe he is a maverick and I've seen his positions slide consistently to the right for the past 12 months. So for me its time for a change. Its time to give Barack Obama a chance to make a difference. Its time for me to make a difference.

If you are eligible to vote and aren't registered I urge you to register. Vote anyway that your conscience tells you but make sure you make a difference.

If you believe as I do that its time for a change you can contribute online with any amount you feel comfortable with: http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/DocSavag

Drill, Baby, Drill?

2008-09-09T11:11:00.001-04:00

I first heard this chant at the Republican National Convention last week. Frankly it baffles me. I’m reminded of course by the obligatory quote from Will Rodgers, “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” I’m constantly frustrated that the majority of people just don’t seem to get that drilling for oil in the US might sound like a solution but it is, at best, a distraction from the real work that needs to be done.

Some Statistics: The United States apparently consumes a little less than 25% of the total oil consumed in the world. We currently produce only about 44% of our oil domestically and import the other 56%. About 30% of our oil is imported from Mexico and Canada. The rest is imported from other countries with the other largest being Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Venezuela. About 42% of our oil consumption is for transportation.

While drilling for more oil offshore and even looking at more drilling in the Arctic will have a small long term effect on our energy independence it won’t have a significant impact for at least 15-30 years. And it will have almost no impact on the actual cost of transportation fuel because even optimistic projections increase our domestic oil production only by 2-4% of the world oil supply if we drilled both offshore and in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). This might have an effect of lowering the cost of a barrel of oil on the open market by less than $3. The price effect on gasoline would be almost nothing.
The other fact that seems to be missing from these discussions is the fact that domestically produced oil is not sold to the US cheaper than foreign produced oil. The oil produced in the US is sold on the open market for the same price as oil produced elsewhere. Raising our production doesn’t automatically lower our prices, and should the world wide consumption continue to grow as it probably will, the price won’t go down at all. The result could keep the price from rising higher than it would otherwise but that isn’t a recipe for fixing the problem we have, it only keeps the problem exactly where it is.

Large corporations making massive profits (like oil giants in the US) don’t take huge risks to develop alternatives to their best selling products. The price of oil jumping from $65 a barrel to more than $140 didn’t make anyone at Chevron or Exxon unhappy. Their profits exploded because the relative cost of producing that barrel of oil didn’t go up (about $25 per barrel), only the market price did. Their incentive is to keep oil prices high enough to make giant profits but not high enough to wake us up and make us change our behavior. Unfortunately for them the recent prices did just that and lower consumption in the US is one of the factors, along with the relative strengthening of the US dollar, which is resulting in a nearly $40/barrel drop in the cost of oil. Simply allowing Exxon or Chevron to drill for more oil in the US will not create an incentive for them to do so. Their stockholders want a return on investment and that depends on the price of oil remaining relatively the same place it is now.

It is true that long term the effect of more domestic oil production is a lower trade deficit and less dependence on foreign nations to supply our vital oil requirements. However the economic impact is far less sure.

It seems obvious to me that the answer for short term and long term is to reduce our consumption. We can do that by chipping away at oil usage with Wind, Solar, Natural Gas, Nuclear and Bio Fuels. Long term we must stop using gasoline to power transportation in this country. The US is lagging behind other countries in developing alternative energy transportation. The Big 3 automakers in Detroit seriously misjudged the landscape (again) and are woefully behind the curve on developing hybrid and other technologies that will reduce our dependence on oil for transportation.

Unfortunately that leaves us with the choice of either using public funds to help the car makers develop those technologies or allowing our domestic automobile market to fall further behind foreign producers who somehow managed to figure out that huge SUVs weren’t the most prudent long term market for automobiles.

I fully support additional drilling, however it should not be the main thrust of our energy policy. At heart its not a policy at all. Its simply continuing to do more of what we’ve already been doing. It seems apparent to me that we cannot drill enough domestically to match our demand for oil without reducing our consumption. We must immediately put the majority of our efforts in reducing our consumption of oil in order to be energy independent. Drill, Baby Drill is not the right rallying cry for America. The right phrase is more like Innovate, Baby, Innovate!

What I Learned While Listening to NPR

2008-07-30T14:46:00.001-04:00

I'm an NPR (National Public Radio) junkie. I listen to it every morning on the way to work and every afternoon on the way home.

Rarely does a day go by that I don't learn something I didn't know the day before.

This morning it was that only female mosquitoes bite. Useless trivia to be sure but interesting nonetheless.

I've learned many facts over the years from the plight of Iraqi children coming to the US for medical help to the fact that there was a near nuclear crisis in the 80's that is second only to the Cuban Missile Crisis in how close to the brink we were to nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

I learned not long ago that make believe games that children play teaches them to moderate their behavior to a set of rules which as adults we use to fit in to society.

Whether its "All Things Considered" or "Car Talk" or "What'yadda Know" I'm constantly surprised by fun little facts or information.

Why Buzz Aldrin IsWrong!

2008-07-11T16:57:00.003-04:00

Apollo 11 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin said in a recent interview that Science Fiction and Fantasy movies and television were to blame for lack of interest in the Space program:

"I blame the fantastic and unbelievable shows about space flight and rocket ships that are on today," Aldrin said in an interview during an ice cream party held by the National Geographic Channel at the Television Critics Association press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif., this week. "All the shows where they beam people around and things like that have made young people think that that is what the space program should be doing. It's not realistic."

Aldrin is just wrong. Fantasy doesn't limit interest in real life space exploration. If anything it does just the opposite. Seeing the fantastic images of what might be waiting for us to explore out there motivates people to want to see for themselves. There is a huge interest of everyday people to be able to take a trip out into space.

Everyone I ever met who was interested in Science Fiction and Fantasy was also spellbound by real life exploration like the Hubble Images or the Mars landers. Its difficult to work up a lot of excitement about another mission in space to deliver a solar panel to a space station that none of us will ever see. The problem isn't that we expect to much, its that we don't demand enough. We should be far ahead of where we are in exploration but we have let the space program become less and less of a priority over the years.

What is wrong with the space program is that we have allowed ourselves to think of it as a luxury that can be discarded in favor of more Earthly priorities. We have lost the passion we had in the 60s for pushing ourselves to explore. We need to make sure we don't sacrifice exploration on the altar of practicality. Protecting ourselves is important but so is expanding our minds and our experiences and pushing out into the massive universe that is out there waiting for us to find out if it is as exciting as our imagination suggests it could be.

The Great Amazon.Com MMO Conspiracy

2008-05-07T21:42:00.002-04:00

6 years ago I fought with Amazon.com over their customer service response to delayed shipping times for Star Wars Galaxies, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game that I wanted to play on launch day.

Basically their order system wasn't updating correctly and I emailed them to inquire about arrival times and they didn't respond until after I had already made other purchase arrangements. The ensuing dispute ended up with me refusing shipment on two copies of the game and them holding my money for more than 2 weeks after the fact. At the end I told a supervisor that unless Amazon.com did something to make it right I would no longer be a customer.

This was a pretty big deal for me because I used Amazon.Com for everything. Books, music, DVDs, gift shopping. All of it. Dozens of purchases in a single year. Their offer was a $5 gift certificate which I threw away and ceased doing business with them.

Flash forward 6 years. I ended my personal boycott after about 5 years because it seemed like that was plenty of time to withhold my money from a company even for the trouble hey had put me through. I started to purchase small items and used their Unbox service to download content to my TiVo.

So today I purchased two copies of an MMO online from them. The MMO is offering a 3 day head start for pre-orders. The web site tells you that you will receive the key via your "Media Library" which is a place you can download your digital content and see your purchases.

The first problem is that the key didn't appear at once and there was no indication where it would show up when it did. Emails to customer service went unanswered. Finally a key showed up. But only one.

I emailed again and got a response about shipping instead of the media library. Another phone call first resulted in them telling me the pre-start offer was "one to a household", after me telling them that was the silliest thing I had ever heard with regards to software licensing and a threat to cancel the order immediately I was put on hold for several minutes and finally told that I would get another key but it would be later. After some dancing around I was told to give them 24-48 hours.

So here I am again after 6 years I'm 24-48 hours away from canceling an order from Amazon.com and buying my MMO software somewhere else. I promise if this occurs the personal boycott will be at least another 5 years. I can't believe after all this time the customer service and understanding of MMO games is still so poor on the part of online retailers like Amazon.com.

Customer Service

2008-03-06T09:27:00.002-05:00

What is good customer service? I think the answer to that question is in how you resolve issues that affect your customers. I'll give you an example.

Last night my wife and I went to eat at a restaurant near our home. We ordered our meal and after a little bit of a longer wait that usual we got our food. My wife's meal wasn't prepared correctly. She took it back and they promised to fix it and get it right back to her.

15 minutes later I had finished eating and she was still waiting. So we went back to the counter and told them we wanted the food to go since we were finished and the food still wasn't ready. They told her that they were just starting to make it and it would be another 10 minutes.

We were understanably upset, they had serviced a huge number of customers (a bus load of teenagers ) since they had been informed of their mistake and yet they had apparently let this issue slip between the cracks. We asked to speak to the manager and told her we just wanted our money back.

She countered that she would comp our next vist but that she didn't want us to leave without the food and she said she would personally make it and it would take only about 5 minutes.

True to her word she went back into the kitchen and within five minues she was back with the meal prepared corretly. Then she comped the entire meal. She opened the register and gave us back the entire cost of the meal and told us that she hoped that we would forgive them the mistake and come back again sometime.

She turned a very bad experience into a very positive one. The cost of one party (around $20) probably saved her restaurant hundreds of dollars of business if we had been turned off and not returned or even not returned for a while.

Hats off to her for being a good manager and taking responsibility for the mistakes that happen business and trying to make it right.

Return of the Cardiac Cats

2008-01-06T10:05:00.000-05:00

Last night saw the return of the Cardiac Cats of old as the Jacksonville Jaguars blew an 18 point 4th Quarter lead to put them on the brink of losing their prime time playoff game against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

On their final posession of the game though Quarterback David Garrard scrambled for 32 yards on a 4th and 2 putting the team in the position of kicking a game winning field goal with under 40 seconds to play. All year the Jaguars have been playing well enough to avoid getting into these nail biting, heart attack enducing games however in the first round of the playoffs they looked like the teams from the Tom Coughlin-Mark Brunell era waiting until the absolute last minute to pull it out.

Now they face the impossible challenge. Going into New England and avoiding being victim #17 on the Patriots quest for perfection. I can only hope that going into the last 40 seconds of that game they still have my heart pounding.

Retail Ranting

2008-01-04T12:10:00.000-05:00

So as a wrap of the holiday shopping season I'll now regale you with my pet peeves from shopping this past year. (Not all of it Holiday Shopping)

The first is the terrible service being provided by retailers at times. My wife and I were at Target recently and we got to the checkout line and one of our items didn't have a sales tag on it. The checkout person just stared at us like a deer in the headlights when we suggested that she get someone to check the price. Not only that she just stopped ringing up out purchases and started looking around for someone to help her like a lost puppy. I finally grabbed the item out of her hand and went and found another item on the shelf so she didn't have to actually do anything to provide service to us.

The second is employees who have no clue about the products their company is selling. Best Buy is notorious for this. They have all this equipment in each department to help them look up inventory items but they never manage to find anything I want and then they give me wrong information about products. I was told quite authoritatively a few weeks ago that a particular product was not scheduled to be sold in the store. Two days later (after I bought it online from Amazon.Com) it was on the shelf.

A co-worker of mine had a similar experience. He purchased an item online for store pickup at Best Buy. The online inventory system said they had 24 of the items in stock. When he showed up the Customer Service rep told him they didn't have any and dismissed the computer as "wrong". After wandering around the store for a while they found the product on the shelf misplaced from the area it should have been. The Customer Service Rep suggested they take it to checkout and pay for it...even though when you buy the product online for store pickup you pay for the item by credit card online!

"The story originates in the minds of the writers."

2007-12-11T14:30:00.000-05:00

The above quote is from George Takei, who protrayed Sulu in Star Trek and currently plays Hiro's father in Heores, in support of the writers against the producers. I quote it becuase it stuck in my mind that its at the heart of the current struggle. If you buy that the content wouldn't exist without the writers and that they make it happen then you must support their desire to have more of the "profits" from their work.

If reading that makes you pause, as it does me, and wonder where all those stories would be without the money the producers are putting up to finance these projects then you must consider the possibilty that the writers are playing on our sympathies and ignoring some dirty little financial truths about the business.

The fact is that a producer doesn't make money on every project. They risk their capital on various projects on the assumption that some of them will really take off and others will fail. Overall unless they are really bad at judging these things they should make a good return on their money.

A Writer who writes a script for hire is paid in advance for his time and his efforts. I support, as a matter of course, the process where writers can negioiate for higher salaries for their time and their efforts. When we get in to residuals though we are talking about profits on the successes without any loss on endeavers which are not successful.

I'm not proposing there be no profit sharing in the entertainment industry. I'm suggesting that calling the producers greedy because they don't want to give up their profits without giving up their losses is ignoring financial reality. Do producers make more of the profits? Yes they do. Should they? Well if you risk millions of dollars you should get more than a few bucks back in exchange for that risk. If you've already been paid for a job you aren't risking anything if that project doesn't turn a profit or even never gets off the ground.

I think the writers should stop painting this picture that they are being mistreated in the process and I think both sides should come to some sort of agreement that allows for writers to take risk for the reward of the profits. To me that means if you want more of the profits you take less of a paycheck up front. I don't take financial risk in my job. I get paid a salary for my work and the risk is that if the company doesn't do well I don't have a job tomorrow. If they do well they generally share a little with me but that isn't a right I've earned..its an incentive for me to do more for the company. Demanding that the investors in my company give me a share of the return on their investment after I've already been paid doesn't make THEM greedy.

All Aboard: Pirates of the Burning Sea Sailing toward Release!

2007-12-03T16:05:00.000-05:00

For the past few months I've had the distinct pleasure of participating in the Closed Beta for a new MMORPG called Pirates of the Burning Sea. Now that the game is going into Open Beta and the NDA has been removed I can finally talk about it in detail.

The game, set in the Caribbean of the 1720's, allows you to play the role of the captain of a ship for one of four different nations in the area (Britain, Spain, France or Pirate!). As Captain you support your nation's efforts to capture ports in the Caribbean and win the map. You can also play a highly sophisticated economic game or just have fun fighting the various NPCs sailing around the Caribbean.

During ship combat you have the ability to grapple your enemy and board their ship. Once there you must defeat the enemy captain and his crew to take the ship!

There are dozens of different ship models to choose from as you level your character depending on your profession. (See this Ship Guide for more information). In addition to ships there are user created flags and sails that can be submitted for inclusion into the game.

The game can be a lot of fun and the ship combat is exciting and engaging. I've had a blast playing this game in beta and look forward to playing it when it goes live in January. As of this Friday they will be running an open beta through Fileplanet and I encourage anyone who likes the age of sail to try it out.

Email Challenged People

2007-11-08T16:34:00.001-05:00

For months I've been battling with and issue of a Gmail user who has a very similar email address to my own. This person's first and last name are the same as mine and the only difference is that his middle initial is in his email address (probably because when he tried to create it mine already existed)

His friends, family, co-workers, golf buddies, Northwest Airlines etc all send me his email constantly. At first I replied to each one explaining that they had the wrong email address. Eventually one of his business associates did the leg work to track down the real address which is why I know what it is.

After a while I tired of replying all the time so I tried forwarding the emails to him hoping he would get a clue and change it or get his contacts to use the right one. No luck.

I know where he goes to church, the name of his wife, child, friends, his Country Club. I know details about business deals he is working on. And, because he put down the wrong email address when he registered with NW Airlines online I get his itinerary whenever he travels.

A few days ago, fed up, I finally sent an email to him directly suggesting he change his email since I was getting so much of his mail and it was really a privacy issue for him. No response.

Seriously this guy, his co-workers, and most of his friends need to learn how to use the Internet!

Excuse me I have to go read a letter from my doppelganger's pastor about services on Sunday. Oh and Becky from Charlotte if you're reading this tell your co-worker I'm still getting his personal email!

When it rains...

2007-10-06T22:48:00.000-04:00

So my wife and I were discussing what to do today and I was being my general reclusive self. Spinning tales about how we have all the things right here at home that we would have going somewhere else (like the beach or camping or the movies etc) and she was laughing at my imagination while bemoaning that she thinks I am a few inches away from being an agoraphobic. So I agree to go out shopping...

As we head over the bridge across the St. John's river there is massive traffic and we slow to 5 miles per hours. She looks at me with this expression like "why today" I just smiled.

She decides to take the first exit off the bridge rather than keep going to the slowed pace. We run into a road blocked off for a street fair and she has to navigate around it with very crowded residential streets and stop signs everywere. By this time I'm laughing at the situation and she is mumbling about never being able to get me out of the house again.

Then we have to stop for a train. She's shaking her head and I'm thinking that I haven't had this much fun in a while!

We get to the store and find almost nothing we want to spend money on..that in and of itself is unsuual for us. And as we start to check out with our paltry purchases we look up and its storming outside. Reallying coming down. It occured to me that the rain was a metaphor for the day. It didn't just drizzle complications in traveling away from the comfort of our home it poured in sheets.

Even so it was fun and my wife's mostly feigned distress over the prospect of me becoming a hermit was even more fun.