CubicleDrone.Net

Yesterday, our President delivered a few words regarding the attempted Christmas day bombing of flight 253 (or what is more popularly referred to as “The Underwear Bomber”). I’ve been waiting to hear this speech before forming some opinions and rants regarding this news story.

Overall – I found Obama’s speech no different from the ones you might hear from any other past President. It was a political move to offer reassurance while providing the public no real information at all. Giving my president the benefit of the doubt – I’ll assume that what ever shocking revelations we were supposed to hear were scrubbed out of the declassified report they promised in order to protect national security interests.

So in no particular order – here are a few quick points that have been brewing in my mind regarding this latest news event:

1.) For those that didn’t catch it, Obama opened his speech by saying this:

This afternoon my counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, John Brennan, will discuss his review into our terrorist watch list system, how our government failed to connect the dots in a way that would have prevented a known terrorist from boarding a plane for America, and the steps we’re going to take to prevent that from happening again.

Note that we just had the President of the United States call someone who now is  being treated as a criminal with all of our constitutional protections – a known terrorist. Isn’t this a reason for a mistrial? Shouldn’t this guy get off Scott-free and then sue our government for libel?

This is what we get when we revert back to a pre-9/11 mindset and treat these people not as soldiers in a war trying to kill us… but as criminals just like any other purse-snatcher or mugger. For those that think this is a correct way of thinking – apparently we’ve not learned much.

2.) The phrase “The buck stops with me” is an even MORE annoying platitude than “Let me be clear…”. As if reassuring us that he takes full responsibility for something while not really taking responsibility for anything at all is supposed to make me feel better? I find it insulting.

Now, I’m not a fan of Obama – but I don’t get what he needed to take responsibility for.  I wasn’t really asking the POTUS to take responsibility for this. Intelligence gathering and communication can be a difficult and sometimes imperfect thing. I get that. While it *would* have been nice for our government to filter through a little more information about what they were actually going to do in response to this – that might have been a bit much to ask as well. Either way, all I’m asking him to do is to take this war on terror seriously. Which brings me to my next point…

3.) The revelation that we are no longer going to send Guantanamo detainees back to Yemen is shocking to me.

This idea of shrugging off our national security onto counties that are at best bad actors, and at worst enemies of ours looking destroy us is pretty upsetting. I find it shocking that it is now just occurring to our government that shipping off some of these bad guys to counties like Yemen might be a bad idea.

Who thinks this stuff up? Do we have a bunch of 8 year olds running this country? Again… not seeing how we really learned anything since 9/11.

Oh and speaking of a post-9/11 world…

4.) Let’s talk airport security.

Who here thinks that taking off your shoes at security makes you any more safe? Who here looks at the TSA staff any time they are about to fly and say to themselves “Now THERE is a group of determined professionals”.

Anyone? C’mon, raise your hands. Don’t be shy.

That’s what I thought.

The truth is that TSA has become like any other American bureaucratic agency, with its unwillingness to see past convention or think outside the box. Instead all we get are mediocre employees looking for job security, and agency officials playing CYA.

Personally, I don’t think we don’t need more technology. What we NEED is more dedication to keeping us safe. What we need is to treat everyone as a suspect and begin profiling people based off of race, religion, country of origin, and any other pertinent factors. You know… doing THAT instead of harrassing 80 year old grandmothers.

If we were to emulate a model for airport security – we would do well to imitate the Israeli system. They seem to have a better track record than us. I’ll just go out on a limb here and  say that might be due to the fact that they have adopted the national mindset that every day there are people trying to kill them.

So… what do I think of Obama’s speech yesterday? Not much. I saw another politician doing politician type things, and I think that not a whole lot is going to change.

I was reading Massively this morning at work and ran into this article regarding what they think will happen with the MMO gaming market over the coming year. Certainly there are some high profile games on the horizon with Final Fantasy XIV, Global Agenda, and Star Wars: The Old Republic being some of the titles I am most anticipating.

The playable races for FFXIV

One of the best quotes from this article was this:

2009 was really a trying year for MMOs. With the closures of The Matrix Online and Tabula Rasa, and the fall of high profile games like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, I think more developers will be taking a step back to make sure they’re doing the right things with their games before they push the “release game” button.

This couldn’t be more true.

Last year I retired from World of Warcraft to try other MMOs. While Age Of Conan and and Warhammer Online had their strong points each game was incomplete. While I was not expecting something as vast and as immersive as WOW is now – I was at least hoping to get something that was more than just half of a video game. Having played both to end game – I can say that these games could have been strong competitors to the WOW juggernaut if they had just fleshed out these games just a bit more (okay, a lot more).

Both games lacked decent crafting systems. The crafting system that we had in WAR made no sense, and felt entirely unimportant. The system AOC provided at launch was completely broken – with a grind that was even more painful than the level grind it took to get to level 80.

Neither game provided a sense of character development that made sense. Both attempted to mimic the talent trees that made WOW character development fun and replayable – but neither game could create systems that made sense to the player. Additionally,  neither game (a result of being PVP-centric in my opinion), could come through with a leveling experience that didn’t feel like a grind. While the questing wasn’t BAD – neither game could come through with a varied enough experience for a player that included things other than player vs. player choices.

Warhammer Online was the strongest MMO to be released in a while - but still lacked any end game.

I think there are some lessons learned – and other lessons that need to be learned again by software gaming developers. Because of that – I thought I’d list some of my 2010 MMO predictions:

• Most every MMO released will try to escape the idea of The Holy Trinity – the only one that will come close to getting it right is FFXIV.
• Learning from the failures of PVP-centric games like AOC and WAR, developers will start playing more to the PVE side of MMO gaming while making PVP a smaller factor of the gaming genre.
• Global Agenda will be the PVP-centric game which will be the exception and flourish as it provides players a more episodic experience with the instant gratification of shooting people in the face. I think it will be the next step for Team Fortress styled gaming.
• Star Trek Online will ship incomplete and will not last the year with any sort of appreciable player base. In short: It will be terrible.
• FFXIV will do well if they learned from the lessons of their previous MMO – and some of the failings of Aion: Players hate a ridiculous level grind.
• SWTOR will be released a bit too early and suffer a slow start. It may eventually gain its numbers from those who remember Star Wars: Galaxies, and find this sequel enjoyable. It will have a better crafting system, but the PVE side of the game will be somewhat lacking for the first several months of release.
• Cataclysm will be held and not released until around November in preparation for the 2010 Christmas season. No other game is going to be able to compete with this 5 year old MMO until people realize that crafting, economy, as well as variety in gameplay all matter in making a successful MMO. Neither SWTOR or FFXIV will quite reach that mark – but they will be the closest yet.

Happy New Year!

As you can see… this thing has not been updated in quite some time. The Christmas season is always a busy one for me as I jump from holiday party to holiday party, try to figure out what gifts to give, and of course – spend a weekend with the family.

I do swear that this year’s gift giving was some of the most frustrating for me as I had VERY little idea what to give anyone in my family. Even though I started almost 2 months early with my shopping – I once again didn’t have everyone figured out until just days before  Christmas Eve. It would be more helpful to me if I had family who would e-mail me hints of what they wanted throughout the year so that I could sort through them when I was ready to begin shopping away.

Does anyone remember this movie? Either way - Christmas shopping is always like doing combat.

While it all worked out for the best, my previously AWESOME gift-giving skills seemed to be hit or miss this year.  I’m going to work on this with better ideas so I can Christmas shop like a champion next year.

This last year ended a little differently. This year I had my partner and wonderful girlfriend around to celebrate a late Christmas and New Years.  She had mailed my presents to me prior to her arrival and I had her presents all wrapped and waiting underneath the Christmas tree.

My Christmas tree may or may not resemble something from the Charlie Brown Christmas special.

She got me some music and clothes, I got her books. While  to the average reader CLOTHING may not sound like an exciting gift – this is one girl who reads my blog. She not only got me some warm, stylish stuff I needed – but some of that clothing was even geek friendly. One such thing was a sweatshirt she picked up that had the words “Lag Kills” with a nice graphic above. I totally approved and it is now one of my favorite warm clothing pieces.

This New Years was also probably one of the best ever. I took her to dinner (which by the way – was amazing), and we did New Years resolutions together. It was a fun and interesting exercise.

Like many before it – my New Years resolutions were not things that I would give up or quit doing – but things that I would do better, improve upon, and start doing. It seems to me that I’ve got a pretty clear idea what I want to be doing this year, and it will be exciting to see how much of it I can make real.

Sometimes, a screenshot is worth a 1,000 words.

Right now I am spending some my time on WOW leveling a warlock. A few weeks ago, I was looking through Wowhead to get a little more information of what to expect in my next few levels as a warlock. I’ve been looking at potentially speccing Demonology as I get near to the level 50 mark. As I was investigating my options – I came across this little gem that i just had to share.

Sometimes the comments area in Wowhead can provide some additional insight, data, or just pure humor. In this case, I have to thank the writer of this for a good laugh. Despite the QQ’ing towards the end, I thought it was pretty good.

I’m jealous of every Felguard

Underneath the sun

I don’t wish I had a Felguard pet, no

I wish that I WAS one.

Oh I wish I was a Felguard,

with bad teeth and spiky back

With a charge that doesn’t miss

Whenever I attack

To be able to enter combat

With a bar full of blue rage

to start shooting off specials

the very moment I engage!

To wield a mighty 2H axe

without worry of the cost

A felguard isn’t ‘normalized’

so no rage there is lost

And to fight my foes half naked

without a speck of fear

Oh to be a felguard

un-dependent on gear!

Sure I’d be a warlocks slave

won’t bother me in the least

No different than things are now

I’m shackled to a priest!

So Blizzard if you’re listening

(Yeah right, we’ve no such luck)

I wish I was a Felguard

So then I could cease to suck.

Advertising on the internet is as much a fact of life as advertising anywhere else. Aside from the normal amounts of spam and popups that permeates through our online existence,we are also inundated with links and pictures through many of our favorite sites.

I think this bombardment of advertisement has become so consistent, so regular, that as users, we’ve conditioned ourselves to filter out these ads so that we can get to the meat and potatoes of our internet experience. In doing so, we sometimes miss some fine pieces of ridiculous advertisement.

Seriously? I’m kinda wondering what was paid to have this bit of advertising waste bandwidth on FaceBook…

An idea I’ve been playing with….

Over the last 10 years I’ve been fixing people’s broken computer stuff. I’ve built my own computer stuff. I’ve worked on ways to squeeze more performance out of my own home machines – but occasionally those at work as well. I’ve provided free technical support and advice to family and friends, and often make purchasing recommendations for the latest gadgets.

I do at home the same things I do at work. Heck, I’ve even written a little bit about that in this blog.

Over the course of this last year I started to run into more people who either had their own side venture or started their own businesses entirely. With wanting a little extra cash so that I could fly to see my girlfriend,  I’ve started to think that there might be a business opportunity here as I work on the systems for more and more of my friends. I seem to have the inability to say no, and can break down technical issues in layman’s terms. I also certainly enjoy working around computers and don’t mind making them better.

So… Maybe I should do some part time work. Build home systems, and fix broken computer stuff for some extra cash? What should I set my pricing at? What sort of things would YOU hire a local geek for?

I’m looking at Geek Squad, and their pricing is pretty horrific. If people are willing to pay that much for these kinds of services that I could do just as well, maybe I should try to advertise my expertise at a more friendly and cheaper rate?

If I start diving more into this, maybe I might also redo this blog from a personal to a more technical journal. Heck – I might start a brand new journal specifically for the explanation of home computing. Explaining the basics of a PC to novice computer users, the reasons for errors, or even hardware reviews.

Gears are turning…

A while back I was checking to see if there were any videos out there of Der Blutharsch, a relatively obscure industrial group I’d just discovered. As I was looking, I ran across the I’ve posted below. This appears to be a fan video created by an independent film maker named, Davide Pepe. If you go to his site, you can see a few of his other videos. The rest of the clips on his site are not music videos, but short videos. I really dig them, and they stand as great (though short) creative works on their own.

I think this is a great song, and this is a fitting video to go with it.

You never really appreciate how important holidays are until you start living on your own I think. Years ago – I moved away from Washington and down to Oregon. I had always gotten along with my family, and had gotten used to heading over to visit my folks for the holidays. Then, one year, I was living out of state and working through the Thanksgiving holiday. It was at that time when I realized just how apart I was from most everyone I knew.

It kinda sucked.

Then that Christmas, it appeared as if it was going to be the same deal all over again. I had asked for the time off, but my corporate overlords gave me the short straw for that holiday as well and it looked as if I was I were going to be stuck at work for the holidays. I forgot what eventually gave me my reprieve from work – but at the last minute, I caught word that I could take off for the Christmas holdiay. I called my folks and instantly made the drive North. It was one of the better holidays that I remember having.

Since then – I’ve always appreciated my holidays just a bit more, and this year I’ve thought just a little more on that as I’m sure life will be changing a whole lot for me next year.

Now onto the *real* reason for Thanksgiving. Yummy, yummy turkey:

I’m a big fan of food. Tasty food. Our Thanksgivings tends to have more of it than could possibly be consumed by a large human family. But that doesn’t stop us from trying. Now with that, I’m curious to hear other Thanksgiving stories on the pages of my various friends. I also have one quick holiday question before I take off to enjoy the rest of the week and my Turkey day:

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I found this piece of news as I was riding up the elevator to work today, and I think my holiday season just became a little bit darker:

The USPS is dropping a popular national program begun in 1954 at its office in North Pole, Alaska. volunteers would open and respond to thousands of letters addressed to Santa each year. Replies come complete with North Pole postmarks….

Due to all of this, letters which formerly were generically addressed to Santa Claus, North Pole and were delivered to North Pole, Alaska, will go to Anchorage instead. Citizens of North Pole are understandably upset.

Now – there are a few things about this story that were illuminating:

1. That there is actually such a place as North Pole, Alaska. That is kind of cool.
2. That our postal service would send letters addressed to Santa.
3. This is yet another reason why sex offenses should be considered a capital crime.

I got to hear one of the local government guys of North Pole Alaska talk about this outrage in a radio interview. To hear him tell it, you’d think that the Government killed Christmas…

And they very well might have. I can think there will be many a teary-eyed child wondering why they’ve not received a response from Kris Kingle this year.