So Management and I made it through the first three episodes of the IT Crowd and while I enjoy the help desk humor plotting enjoyment sees the curve dropping off with each subsequent episode. Now it could be that they are just setting up each character by delving into outside social relationships but I think the show could be tighter if the focused on the office and the relationship of IT. Overall, the show has been a bit of a let down but then again how viable would be a TV show about help desk trolls like myself, it’s not like there is an abundance of appreciation for network infrastructure, which is viewed like air, you only miss it when it isn’t there.
Archive for March, 2006
The conditions were just about right for fire a couple of blocks from where I work. It made for a hypnotic scene on the commute home thick black smoke spiraled lazily up and drifted over the river like a long arm draped over the towns of East Hartford and Windsor.
After sounding like “a lunatic nimrod in the [Grups] article” he posts his thoughts and take on the whole “alternaparenting” flapadoodle, which really sounds asshatish to me but I’m not a parent so draw your own conclusions, and I’m glad to read that he does not constantly tool on his son for his taste in media. That’s a good start for boosting his self-esteem.
In the Game Over column from Mar. 29 Morris talks about the aim of Nintendo to keep the price ceiling were it is and personally, I’d back that. I have bought a lot of gaming dreck in my life, and on occasion payed full rack for games that I thought were must haves when they hit the street. Fact of the matter is, I am hard pressed to justify the prices in that the perceived value is not there for me. The exceptions to that have been Elder Scrolls, both KoTORs, Tales of Symphonia, and Animal Crossing; those games became incredible value propositions as I sunk many, many hours into each of them. Games like Fable and Jade Empire, while enjoyable, did not deliver in the same fashion and I was left feeling like I over payed.
Granted, I am aware that production costs are spiraling for games but I’m not so sure that what is currently being sold warrants those lofty budgets not to mention that those prices are likely to marginalize casual gamers. Iwata is on message, yet again, in that keeping to ceiling low is another method by which they anticipate differentiating themselves from the competition. the message along is that gaming needs to return to its roots, that the reason we play is to be entertained and the best hook is to have good gameplay, that graphics alone do not make the game.
The gaming industry appears to be putting some much faith in creating “Blockbusters” by upping the polygons and adding name brand voice talent but it is as the expense of producing a quality game. Anderson over at The Long Tail writes about the overall decline of the blockbuster movie and while many different ecological factors play into that–Internet, home theater sales, and satellite/cable TV narrowcasting–the games industry could be following the same path. For all the bigger budgets, less movies, higher prices revenue is still flat. Driv3r might have enjoyed brisk sales for a bit but it left a bad taste in the mouth of many gamers and Atari might have been better served with lower budget, high quality games that targeted smaller markets. If you need evidence of what a small, high quality title can do look to Katamari Damacy.
Nintendo could be wrong and I could be way off base, particularly seeing how the most popular titles are ones from “pump one out every 9 to 12 months franchises” like Madden or “drop it in a new era but leave the same broken ass game mechanics” GTA. People are sheep and they are going to buy whatever MTV tells them is hot but it would be nice to dream that people might be getting fatigued from the endless sea of sameness that plagues the retail shelves. I’ll tell you what, yet another WWII FPS is not worth $60 no matter how cool the physics engine is or how realistic the blood spray because it is the same tired on rails design that ushers the players from point A to point B shooting at pop up targets. Meh.
the opening paragraphs of the article, Up With Grups, left a bad taste in my mouth with the self-serving attitudes and the could-give-a-rats-ass take on the future but towards the end it struck a very raw nerve, one that I have been fretting over for the past couple of years. Adam Sternbergh writes:
Which brings me back to my father: the one who wore suits, not jeans; the one who, when he was my age, already had four kids; the one who logged a lifetime at exactly the kind of middle-management jobs that no one wakes up excited about going to in the morning, and who then found himself sandbagged by the late-eighties recession, laid off in what must have felt like the worst kind of double whammy. All the adult trade-offs he’d made turned out to be a brutal bait-and-switch. Is it any wonder that the Grups have looked at that brand of adulthood and said, “No thanks, you can keep your carrot and your stick.” Especially once we saw just how easily that stick can be turned around to whap your ass as you’re ushered out the door, suit and all. Just how easily a bona fide, by-the-book adult can be made to wonder where it all went wrong, and why you ever bothered to grow up in the first place.
Essentially, Sternbergh described my father, a man who put some 30+ years of his life into a company only to see it washed away in the early years of the 1990’s. I was a sophomore in college when it happened and it shook me greatly to see a man that I had known my whole life as going to work each and every day without fail before six and coming home after six be left anchorless sitting in his chair staring at the paper not really reading the words on the page. I asked myself if that was the reward for compromising and giving everything to the firm, to be cast aside when the firm has no more use for you. Was this what I had to look forward to when I reach adulthood?
Somewhere along the way I forgot the taste of the initial fear and I believed that with enough education and hard work I could amass material comforts that would make me feel better about myself and my direction in life. When things took a downturn in the last handful of years I was shaken out of my stupor to realize that I had been running in place and that my definition of adulthood was grounded on the same compromises that had betrayed my father. While I had run straight into B School I stumbled out with a stellar GPA but little to no desire to use it to make money for someone else. Defining myself and being comfortable in my skin became more important than a fatter paycheck.
This is where I most identify with these Grups; what is the definition of adulthood and is a hard and fast definition even applicable anymore? I have friends that I certainly see as being more adult than myself but these are usually ones who have reached a stage or two ahead of me, in this case parenthood, and it hammers home the fact that I have been using a sliding scale to define adulthood. It started with “When I graduate college and start a career”, which quickly evolved into, “When I finish B-School”, yielding to “When I assume a mortgage”, and now rests on “When we start a family.” Changing the definition has always kept this inevitable cultural notion one step ahead of me and now I am questioning even the relevancy of it.
I am aging, my body tells me so in that I wake up on cold damp mornings with a stiff knee and a creaky hip, and while I often dismiss those ails as old sports injuries the simple fact is that I am healing slower and old injuries are creeping up on me. Youth is as much a physical state as it is a mental one and while my body slows and stiffens like a preemptive rigor mortis I find myself increasingly desperate to maintain some sort of youthful credibility be it those games and music or just being more knowledgeable about youth culture than my thirteen year old niece who is living it. That is sad, just as sad as the Grups who use their children as little malleable vessels for their own tastes in culture or those who live out their frustrated dreams through their offspring. It is sad because that act of looking backward to keep moving forward does not allow me to really grow as a person and neither does all this artificial benchmarking.
Life happens, as the tee shirt goes, and the last thing I want is to one day wake up and realize that I squandered it. I don’t want to wake up one day like my father to the realization that I am disposable, career does not define the person, nor do I want to be like some of the individuals in this article forever chasing relevancy and that amorphous state of hipness, clothes do not make the person either. I may not have any answers today, and likely will still be fretting about these very same issues with my last breath, I can say that, at least for now, I am doing my best to define myself and my life by my terms and not one from a marketing firm or from a political-cultural power structure.
Linux.com posted a story, Making the jump to Linux: Six frustrations, detailing the travails of a new user making the switch. At times I can commiserate with him, particularly with getting dial-up working–which I never did–and at others just scratching my head–why didn’t you buy a book or two? Two books that helped me get past the moments of blinding frustration were Linux Pocket Guide, Linux for Dummies: Quick Reference; granted this are reference guides but they help when you want to translate Windows and DOS commands to their *Nix counterpart.
Now, I am by no means an expert at using this flavor of Debian but I am getting to the point that I am more comfortable using it and administering a server based on it than I am wrenching on the Windows boxes at work. I switched Management over nearly a year ago and she charmed me by calling up with a problem on her work computer. She wanted to save a file but could not locate her home directory, “I’m telling you there is no /home on this system!” Looks like someone else has made the switch because Windows has no home.
I have a feeling that the switch will be permanent as we have both talked about the unlikelihood that when we buy new laptops in a year or so that we’ll even boot Vista, rather we’ll peel off the license, file it, and boot to an Ubuntu installer. It would be nice, though, if we didn’t have to pay the Microsoft tithe and could just buy a laptop sans OS. Sure it is only a savings of $100 but that is my $100 and I would rather donate it to a distro of my choosing.
One more thing, thanks to the fine folks over at Ubuntu Forums and Linux Questions for making our first year a good one, both of us appreciate it.
