Category: geekery

I’m addicted to Civ3. I was addicted to Civ2 and still played it regularly until Civ3 came out. The game is addictive, and since I’ve been sick and alone in the house, I’ve played a lot. Civ3 is a great update of the previous game, but it’s missing a lot of the stuff that made playing more convenient in Civ2. I’ve come up with a little list of things I’d love to see them add back to the new game.

• The Go to city command for units. It’s a pain in the butt to have to drag each little unit individually to a city.

• The “Upgrade All Units” that Leonardo’s Workshop used to give you. If you’ve got cash in the game, there’s no real reason to build it.

• Build Railroad doesn’t work with the R key like it’s supposed to.

• I haven’t played enough to have tried putting the barbarians past the second level, but they never show up. I have yet to see one.

• Ou est le cheat menu?

There are also some things that other strategy games do that would make the game a lot better and more than a facelift.

• In Command and Conquer and Age of Empires, granted they’re both real-time strategy instead of turned based, you can group units and move them together. Why oh why can’t we do that in Civ3? Towards the end of a militaristic game when you’ve got hundreds of units, moving them all individually is a waste of time that doesn’t improve the game experience.

• Better special units. I’ve only played the Americans and Zulu’s so far, but the Impi is a horrible unit. Once you’ve got Spearmen, he’s useless, other than looking kind of cool.

• Swordsman should be upgradable to Musketmen, or at least Infantry. I never build them now because you can’t upgrade them at all until Mechanized Infantry (which only take 1200 years)

• I’m not sure anyone else does this, but how about a different leader over the years? No one’s emperor lives for three thousand years, although I guess in the game, the player is the leader. It would be interesting though to see Abe get older, and then be replaced by Kennedy, then maybe Reagan.

I was thinking about this yesterday on the way home from work, through my swollen face, that the diplomacy in the game is just a little more complex than in Civ2. Trading and making deals through the diplomatic screen is great. But, I’d love to see more nuance. I know it would be incredibly complex, and be a game within itself, but wouldn’t it be cool if you could nurture your advisors, make them act like real people, put them in charge of trade altogether, military operations, etc. That way, you could concentrate on the parts of the game that interest you without completely dropping the others. Also, it would be great if there were a system of back channels. Clandestine meetings with other countries’ advisors instead of going to the leader, with each nationality getting a different set of unique advisors (for example, the Greeks would have a killer Cultural advisor, the Americans would have great military and trade, the Romans, a great military advisor). Also, it would be cool if you could recruit away the Greek’s cultural advisor to improve your civilization’s culture. Yeah, that’s complex, but would add a new dimension to the game that I think it’s missing. Now, it’s “Hey, want some stuff?”, “Want a map?”, “Die, scum!” and that’s about it. There’s no real way to intimate sabre-rattling without sitting a bunch of naval units inside their borders until they declare war on you (cuz I don’t like to throw the first punch).

I’m not saying Civ3 isn’t a great game. It’s an excellent turn-based strategy game. It’s held up well over the years, and this installment adds some nice wrinkles. I just think it would be nice if they didn’t remove some of the nice utility features of Civ2, and added some more complexities.

New Geekery entry: Linux Newbie Tips and Tricks.

What is a geek’s polar opposite? Who makes it impossible to be perfectly geeky? Managers. They’re not all bad. They don’t all make geek lives miserable. But, there are some who seem to thrive on impossible and arbitrary deadlines, insisting that they know how to do something the “right” way even though they’re not the least bit technical, are enamored with constantly changing requirements, and will nitpick until what little hair you have left is laying in a pile on the floor after being yank from your head in frustration.

Managers are a neccessary evil. They provide feedback, and the best of them provide a good shield between bureaucracy and the geek. The worst managers are fickle, uncommunicative and only out to improve their own chances for promotion while never offering praise in public (or private) for the members of their teams. To be a good manager, you’ve got to be able to switch gears between talking to your superiors and talking to the people who work for you. Being a good geek manager takes this to the extreme. You have to know businessSpeak to talk to your boss, but be able to remove all the bullshit when you talk to the geeks. Geeks despise bullshit. If you want to watch a geek explode, start talking about monetization, marketing or paradigms. It just doesn’t work. Geeks like facts and figures, hard requirements and pizza.

Geeks also like food. If you feed a geek, he’ll be your’s for life. Ply your geeks with pizza, donuts and yes, alchohol (not me, though… Dr. Pepper). They’ll work their bony little butts off for you if you feed them.

Geeks like toys. Make sure your geek can order new computers every year or so. Give them the tools they want/need to do their jobs. If they produce quality work, then reward them with new toys (like my shiny new G4). It keeps them happy, and gives them one less thing to whine about as you work them to death.

Geeks do not like Ken dolls. Don’t be a glad-hander. Don’t say something if you know it won’t happen. Geeks have long memories and low self-esteem. They remember being slighted and hold grudges. If you’re not going to throw a happy hour, don’t say you will. If you don’t think you can get Herman Miller chairs for everyone, don’t say you can. Say you don’t think you can, but you’ll try. That’s all geeks want: honesty. For the most part, geeks will be honest with you. It’s part of the Geek Code of Honor… which I think is based on something from Star Trek.

Speaking of geekgasm…. If you’re using Mozilla or Netscape 6.x, you can now change how lawver.net looks. Go to View -> Use Stylesheet, and you should see the option “Deco” there. Choose and watch the purpleness!

Why do we geeks get so excited by technology? Why do we go into convulsions of joy when we build something that works? It’s art, baby. I’ve figured it out. Writing code is an artform. Writing good code (where good is defined by each individual geek, unfortunately) is the equivalent of Waterlilies by Van Gogh. It moves me. When something works, it’s like a gallery show of my work. I can tell my family and friends, “Look, see what I have built and the cool stuff it can do.” Even though most of them aren’t geeks, they can look and see that it works and doesn’t break when they click stuff. To them, it is good. To my geek friends, I can say, “Look at my tiny codebase that’s portable to other projects. Look at the thoughtful inside jokes I put in my useful comments. Gaze upon my stellar documentation. Marvel at my valid DOCTYPE and how well-tabbed everything is.”

The best is when I build something that not only works and looks good, but performs. I can look at it and know that it’s handling several hundred requests a second and standing strong. Nothing’s more difficult or rewarding than building product for large-scale consumption. Almost anyone could eventually write something that will work on a small scale or in testing. It takes a special something to build it to withstand a pounding and stay up. The opposite is building something that I think is top-shelf and then have it come crashing to earth under load. It’s demoralizing. It’s tedious to go through hundreds of lines of code to find variables that might not be unset or data structures that aren’t freed. It takes time, which is usually in short supply. But, once it works again, all is well and triumph is sweet!!

Thus ends another lesson. Be sure to hug your geek.

Here are some tips on being a geek and actually getting paid for it:

• Learn to be a ‘tweener. You should be able to do actual geeky things. The trick is to also learn how to communicate the uber-geeky concept to the non-geeky boss or co-worker. This will make you the indispensible translator and you will get promoted.

• Work insane hours for your first year. It will give you the reputation of being a hard worker. After your reputation has been earned, you can start slacking again.

• Learn to play UT. This shouldn’t be hard for the geeky, but it’s nice to have the skill. This will earn the respect of your co-workers if you can kick their asses. It’s also how we network here. “Oh, you’re MeatKevin? Yeah, you’re a mean killin’ machine. Wanna raise?”

• Be the expert. Pick some part of your job and become the expert. Know more about it than anyone else in your group. This makes you valuable and you probably won’t get laid off.

• Be Clean. For Gomer’s sake, bathe. Even if you follow all the other rules, if you’re not clean, no one will talk to you. You’ll be known as that weird dirty guy and being known for something unflattering is the expressway to Layoffville, my brother (or sister).

Oh, and the best part about working here? We make up codenames and stupid words for things and then don’t tell anyone what they are. So, if you go to a meeting with another group, they have their own codenames and stupid words. It’s so like speaking another language that the first thirty minutes of the meeting is spent coming up with translations for each group’s terms and agreeing on what to call them for the second thirty minutes of the meeting, at which point everyone forgets the new words and confuses the living hell out of everyone for the rest of the meeting. After the meeting, we send out e-mails with the new glossary and translation charts, which everyone then prints multiple copies of, binds and then stick on a shelf – because we’re a technology company, and that’s how we store information.

You know what I love about our industry? We make up words. We make up stupid words. At AOL, we make up stupid acronyms and codenames for things. The other day, I was in a meeting about a project to add dynamic content to a currently static product. It was me and a bunch of uber-geeks and we were struggling to describe the process of taking this static content and making it dynamic. That’s when I made up Dynamicize. So, this is how the rest of the meeting went, with frowns from the guy with no sense of humor:

Me: So, it gets dynamitated after it leaves System X and before it gets to System Y or does it happen somewhere else?

Other Guy With Sense of Humor: No, the dynamicization happens between System Y and System Z, as you can clearly see in my squiggly lined illustration on the white board.

Guy With No Sense of Humor: Ok, the process to create this dynamic content happens here (points to white board, frowns, head explodes).

and… scene.

Whenever I wonder why I don’t have a PDA, I try to think of this. That’s what a handheld should do. And yes, I don’t have a cell either. I just have my lovely work-provided two-way pager. I don’t want an electronic calendar. I want a phone, browser and organizer all in one. Soon, it will be possible, and then I’ll think about getting one. I’ve held out this long, I can wait. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.

I know I’ve been slacking about posting, but I have perfectly valid reasons. Like anything with life, stuff runs hot and cold. Work is hot right now. Blogging – eh – not so hot. I’ll still post daily, but probably not the deluge I had been offering. Also, life is hot. Max has decided that sleeping is not his ‘thing’ at the moment, and that means everyone at the Lawver house is doing a little adjusting. Jen’s not getting her normal nap because Max isn’t taking his. We’re staying up later because Max is. We’re getting up earlier, cuz, yet again, Max is. So, we’re making due with Carry-Out and lots of help from my family (and moral support from her parents in Tucson). Once I wake up, I’m sure I’ll be all chatty and sharing again.

In the sharing vein (which, kids, you should never do. Remember, sharing veins is for foreigners and weirdos. If you share veins, the terrorists have already won! Ok, you can ignore me now.), I’ve rediscovered iTunes radio tuner feature, and am totally addicted to Groove Salad. It’s trancey, groovy and conducive to half-awake coding.

In good work news, my new LogCrunching machine should be here in the next week or so. It will be berry berry nice:

• Dual Xeon 1.7ghz

• 1gb Rambus RAM

• 2 36gb SCSI hard drive

• nVidia Quadro2 video card w/ 64 mb

• dual NICS

• RedHat 7.2

• Sweet free mouse pad

What will I be doing with this machine? I’ll be crunching lots of files and extracting numbers from them like a SuperJuicer. How? I can’t post the code or anything, but I’ll be using AOLserver because it does a great job of scheduling jobs and I already know it. I’ll use Postgres to dump the numbers into. It will be lots and lots of fun and give me my desktop machine back so I don’t have to run the numbers I run now on it. A winner all around.