February 26, 2009

Sneak Preview - Fallen Angel - Alternate

Xannon enters the temple and kneels before the statue of Bast. Having only recently been reopened, the marble floors and alabaster lamps still reflected the evening light from the nearby windows. The newly rebuilt statue welcomed everyone with open arms, including Xannon. He feels a presence behind him.
"Rise, Xannon. What is it you wish?"
Xannon stands and turns to see the beautiful figure of Bast. He catlike eyes glowing slightly in the night. He is momentarily entranced by her beauty but quickly regains himself.
"Why did it have to be this way? Why the years of war, death, pain, and suffering? I was ready to fight for you, to end the war. I could have done it. I feel it in my bones, my heart, my soul. I know I've asked you many times since my return but you have never given me a straight answer. Either I'm not ready, or I wouldn't understand, but you never give me a chance to understand. You never tell me when I'll be ready. What would have happened if Sarah hadn't died? If I would have stayed with you?"
Bast ponders this while strolling over the the statue of herself. It stood over twice as tall as a normal person, nearly 15 feet.
"You were always my favorite student. Have I told you that? Celeste thought the same way. She knew things about you. Things she shouldn't have known, couldn't have known, but still knew. She knew deep down you would return. That's why she did what she did that night you came to visit. She sacrificed herself for you."
Bast stops for a moment and stares off into the night.
"So many sacrifices. So many lost for the greater good."
"What greater good? 400 years of war? The loss of hundreds of your followers? Most of them as a result of my actions? Even Gatomon fell to my blade."
"Life," Bast states simply. "The continuation of life."
"Would it not have been better to extinguish the forces of Kardis when we had the chance? What was gained by extending the war? Tell me, Bast. Explain it to me so that I may understand."
She stops and looks into his eyes.
"Yes. You are ready. But you may not like what you hear. If Sarah had not died, if you had stayed with me, there would have been wonderful glory and heroic death for you."
"Doesn't sound too bad so far."
Bast turns back toward the open window.
"You would have left the temple as a full Mage Knight of Bast. The best we have ever seen. You would have led my armies in a valiant and heroic assault on the forces of Kardis. You would have won the war in only a few short months. But you would not have killed the High Priest of Kardis nor his apprentice. They would have escaped back to their temple in the southern mountains where they would wait and rebuild. They would have still found the book of ancient magics, broken the seal and brought about the apocalypse."
"Which is exactly what I did."
She turns toward him. "Yes, but he would not have stopped. He would have confronted you one on one in the battlefield. You would have fought valiantly and you would have lost. Killed by the High Priest of Kardis. Once you were defeated, the best of the best, the army would have crumbled faster than their morale. The forces of Kardis led by an unstoppable menace would have swept across the lands killing anything and everything. Gatomon would have made a last ditch effort to stop him, but even with the combined powers of the archangels of Gaia, she would have failed. Her and the archangels would have all perished. The forces of Bast and Yehova would have fallen leaving the world to slowly wither away into nothing, eventually every living creature on the planet would have died. Kardis and Rinous would have achieved their ultimate goal."
Xannon lowers his eyes to the floor and thinks about her words.
"Was there no other way?" he finally asks.
"There were, but you must understand that you are special. By yourself, you are the most powerful sorcerer on the planet. Any other path we would have taken would have resulted in your death. By giving you over to Kardis, you would live. As long as you were alive I had a chance to get you back. As the years passed, your anger grew and it became harder and harder to feel you.
"You felt me the day you died. Yet you felt cursed. You felt me every time Sarah's spirit touched your heart. Yet you felt angry. It was then I knew the only way to get you back was to create for you a way to relieve your anger, your hate, your sorrow. That was the reason for the final conflict. That was why so many of my followers were put to the sword. We needed you. I needed you, Xannon.
"From the very moment of your birth I knew you were special. I touched you, nurtured you, loved you. It tore my soul apart to send you away. Just as it tore apart Celeste's. You could see it in her eyes, couldn't you? The day of your trial?"
Xannon turns away from Bast and looks out the front doors of the temple. He wipes away the tears forming in his eyes.
"Enough. I understand everything now. I know why you did what you did. But I do have one more question."
Bast walks up behind him and wraps her loving arms around him in a mothers embrace.
"Where do I go from here? Do I return to Sarah and try to live a normal life. Or do you have bigger plans for me?"
She squeezes him slightly.
"Always bigger plans for you, Xannon. Always."

February 11, 2009

How to Manage Geeks

How to Manage Geeks

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

When the geeks at NCR in Australia threatened to go on strike, it was a move that could have paralyzed ATMs, supermarket cash registers and airplane check-in. This underlines the fact that IT has become so central to almost all corporations, that any disruption may cost a lot of time and money, which again means that keeping the geeks happy at work is an absolute requirement for a modern business. Happy geeks are effective geeks. The main reason IT people are unhappy at work is bad relations with management, often because geeks and managers have fundamentally different personalities, professional backgrounds and ambitions. Some people conclude that geeks hate managers and are impossible to lead. The expression “managing geeks is like herding cats” is sometimes used, but that’s just plain wrong. The fact is that IT people hate bad management and have even less tolerance for it than most other kinds of employees.
So where does it go wrong? Here are some top ways that managers can lead geeks effectively and respectfully.

Steps

1. Value training. If a boss thinks that training is a waste of money and expects you to teach yourself, you feel pretty demotivated in any job. Training matters, especially in IT, and managers must realize that and budget for it. Sometimes you get the argument that “if I give them training a competitor will hire them away.” That may be true, but the alternative is to only have employees who are too unskilled to work anywhere else. Also, if you pay them well and have good benefits, they won't go somewhere else.
   
2. Give recognition. Since managers may not understand the work geeks do very well, it’s hard for them to recognize and reward a job well done, which hurts motivation. The solution is to work together to define a set of goals that both parties agree on. When these goals are met the geeks are doing a great job.
   
3. Keep overtime down. Avoid taking the approach of wringing as much as possible out of IT employees just because you figure they don't lead a normal life. Wrong! That’s a huge mistake and overworked geeks burn out or simply quit. It's a complete myth that long work hours are good for business.
   
4. Avoid using management-speak. Geeks hate management-speak and see it as superficial and dishonest. Managers shouldn’t learn to speak tech, but they should drop the biz-buzzwords. A manager can say “We need to proactively impact our time-to-market” or simply use plain English and stick to “We gotta be on time with this project”. The latter makes total sense to everyone involved.
   
5. Don't try to be smarter than the geeks. When managers don’t know anything about a technical question, they should simply admit it. Geeks respect them for that, but not for pretending to know. And they will catch it - geeks are smart.
   
6. Act consistently. Geeks have an ingrained sense of fairness, probably related to the fact that in IT, structure and consistency is critical. The documentation can’t say one thing while the code does something else, and similarly, managers can’t say one thing and then do something else.
   
7. Don't make the mistake of ignoring the geeks. Because managers and geeks are different types of people, managers may end up leaving the geeks alone. This makes leading them difficult, and geeks need good leadership - the same as all other personnel groups.
   
8. Include them in decisions. Never make decisions without consulting geeks. Geeks usually know the technical side of the business better than the manager, so making a technical decision without consulting them is one of the biggest mistakes a leader can make.
   
9. Give them the tools needed. A fast computer may cost more money than an older one and it may not be corporate standard, but geeks use computers differently. A slow computer lowers productivity and is a daily annoyance. So is outdated software. Give them the tools they need.
   
10. Tools come in many forms. Caffeine is considered a standard tool among Geeks. The more wired they are, the longer they work.
    
11. Remember that geeks are creative workers. Programming is a creative process, not an industrial one. Geeks must constantly come up with solutions to new problems and rarely ever solve the same problem twice. Therefore they need leeway and flexibility. Strict dress codes and too much red tape kill all innovation. They also need creative surroundings to avoid “death by cubicle”.
    
12. Recognize the outcomes of not treating geeks with respect as outlined above. Happy geeks are productive geeks, and the most important factor is good management, tailored to their situation. Doing the opposite to what has been outlined in this article has serious consequences for your organization, including:
    
    • Low motivation
      
    • High employee turnover
      
    • Increased absenteeism
      
    • Lower productivity
      
    • Lower quality
      
    • Bad service
      
    
    

Tips

• Caveat: not all geeks are the same; geeks are wildly different people and this article does generalize dangerously. And this article is not saying that all IT-people are geeks. Some are, some aren’t.
  
• This advice would work well with most employees, not just geeks.
  
• The word 'geek' in this article is not used in a derogatory manner: "definition 3: an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity ."[1]
  
  • The word geek is normally derogatory, but it is thought of as meaning a person with skill and knowledge in the computer arena.
    
  
  

Related wikiHows

• How to Be a Good Manager
  
• How to Be an Effective Project Manager
  
• How to Deal With a Weak Human Resources Manager
  
• How to Develop an IT Change Management Program
  
• How to Improve Your Change Management Skills
  

Sources and Citations

• Original source of article, Alex Kjerulf, How NOT to Lead Geeks. Shared with permission. Thanks Alex, The Chief Happiness Officer!
  

1. ↑ Merriam Webster Online Dictionary

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Manage Geeks. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

September 11, 2008

This is not the end...

...This is not the beginning of the end...

From Eva:R:

What we perceive as our end, we now see as merely a new beginning. A new place from which hope springs forth and the greater glory of human existence has yet to be achieved. A chain with no bound and no birth, stretching into the infinity of possibilities that exist within the space of a single breath.
A feeling, love and hate, desire and anger, loneliness and despair, merging together as one.
An absence, a void left behind where there was nothing before. A sense of lacking in even the most compassionate of spirits.
A presence, a soul deep within,bringing hope to impossibility.
Odds mean nothing. All possibilities exist. All universes are real. All voices are one, singing together in a powerful noble soliloquy.
Join us in this final prayer for all of humanity.
We will not conceed.
We will not be silenced.
We will not run away.
No one can stop this chain of events, for it has already begun.

March 17, 2008

Willpower

"The ability to exert one's will over one's actions"

I thought I had this whole entry laid out in my head, but after reading that article, just about everything I had is gone. So instead you get a lovely, uh...gimme a sec.... Stream of Consciousness entry, which I'm sure will end up on many different tangents as I go along. Anyway, back to the topic.

I like to play WoW, World of Warcraft in case you didn't know. I think it has become one of my favorite games of all time. Probably has something to do with how in depth it is, or the massive amount of configurations all the different items allow. There are hundreds of quests to complete and several large scale, multi person dungeon things to attack and conquer. One in particular that has caught my interest lately is called Alterac Valley. It's a battleground which allows for Player vs. Player action (PvP), but in this case its 40 on 40. The main premise is to attack and kill the opposing side's main boss, but there are several other side things to do as well. There are towers to capture, good guys to save, parts to collect and turn in for extra rewards, and on top of all that fun, you earn 'Honor Points' which allow you to purchase more/better pieces of armor and weapons.

One of the things I like about battlegrounds is I don't have to find a group, meet somewhere, find an opposing group, and start fighting. I just click that I want to join a battleground and within minutes it has matched me up with 79 other people that wanted to join a battleground, 39 for my team 40 for the other. This is made even easier by allowing 'Cross-Realm' players. From my understanding each realm is part of a Battlegroup and when I want to join a battleground I can join with anyone else in that Battlegroup regardless of which realm they are on. For example, I play on the Draenor realm which is part of the Cyclone battlegroup. When I join a BG(Battleground) I'm not limited to the Draenor realm but all realms inside the Cyclone battlegroup, expaning the player base by several times. All this makes it a lot faster to get into a BG, which in turn reduces downtime, increasing fun.

Um...where was I? *scroll* Oh yeah, Favorite games and willpower. It has been mentioned that I might like this game a little too much, that I might be addicted. And while I highly doubt that, there is always that possibility. Plus most addicted people don't usually see themselves as addicted. So in an effort to prove to myself mostly that I am not addicted I plan to not play WoW for a week, starting now. In fact I plan on doing zero WoW related things. That includes visiting WoW websites, looking up WoW item information and the like. Now I can't not think about WoW simply because it's something I like so much, but if I can control my actions and not act on those thoughts, I think I can prove to myself that I am not addicted.

To help with the not playing of WoW, I plan to start working on my story more, which is coming along pretty well I must say. My single 'Fallen Angel' novel, I realized, was too much story and spanned too many years to be contained in one book, so at the moment I have it broken into three. Why three? Because three just seems to fit everything else in my little universe. Three major factions: Good, Evil, Balance (Good and Evil being relative terms). Three sections of Xannon's life: Rise, Fall, Rebirth (Which happen to be the subtitles of the trilogy). The number of sets of wings that Archangels have, which Xannon turns out to be. And I'm sure a whole bunch of other stuff that I can't really think of at the moment. Plus there are the triangles. Triangles are supposed to be the strongest geometric shape, and I can see why. They don't suffer from shear, they can't really be squished. They just work. I used a triangle for the symbol of Gi'erth(the name of the planet my characters live on), with each point representing one of the major forces. The sun represents Good (Creation and Life), Fire represents Evil (Destruction and Death), and the tree represents Balance. I also have a triangle key chain which reminds me of that symbol and my story every time I see or touch it.

I think I got off track again... Oh yeah. One other thing I plan on doing to keep from playing WoW is to start drawing again. I did a little drawing after I got home today and realized my skills, to put it bluntly, suck. That doesn't mean they can't be improved on. Granted I was focusing on figure drawing, in particular a person sitting with their head in their hands. I was studying the pose to hopefully make use of it in a piece I want to create for the song lyrics I posted a while back in reference to Xannon and Sarah, Letter from the Departed. It's supposed to show Xannon/Valkyrie sitting either at his desk or perhaps somewhere outside while Sarah in ghosty form hovers behind him, perhaps giving him a spooky hug or something. I haven't quite worked out the details. If anyone reading this lovely brain spewage(brain spewage? Don't ask it just came out) wants to create this lovely piece of art for me, it would super cool. If not, well...I guess I'll do it. *shrug*

If I'm not writing and not drawing I don't know what I'll be doing. Maybe watching TV/Movie, maybe playing some neglected PS2/Xbox games, preferably ones that don't crash on me like X-Men Legends 2 does. Which really sucks cause it's right near the end before fighting the final boss. I'm tempted to exchange it, but at this point I don't think it's worth it. I've already tried cleaning it to no avail. Hey, maybe I'll use some of the extra time to hang out with Chris and bust out my awesome plastic guitar shredding abilities, also known as Guitar Hero. He recently (last week on...Thursday I believe) got an Xbox 360. He picked up Guitar Hero III Legends of Rock (and since when is Tenacious D a Legend of Rock?), the Lego Star Wars saga, and Sonic, which I think is more for his fiancee Wendy. I figure since he owns the game he should be able to catch up to my awesome skill pretty quick, right? I guess we'll see.

So anyway, If you managed to make through that raging river (instead of a stream) of my thoughts and are still reading let me sum up the article for you: WoW = Like, Me != Addicted, .'. No WoW for a Week to prove: Me != Addicted, Copious Free Time used by Writing, Drawing, Other Gaming, Showing off my awesome plastic Guitar skills and making Chris feel oh-so-bad for oh-so-sucking. At least thats the plan. Only time will tell if everything works out like it's supposed to.

And before anyone asks, I don't want to cancel my WoW subscription because A) it's a pain to cancel and then reactivate, and B) I plan to play again. Plus C) $15/month really isn't all that much when you stop and think about it. I spend more than that on interest on one credit card(stupid interest rates).

So...um....yeah. I guess I'm done. I'm off to bed. Leave comments and let me know if thought this whole Stream of Consciousness(does it suck that I have to look up how to spell that every time?) thing was a stupid idea and should never do it again.

....um....k, laters.

Obama and his Church

In response to an email regarding a March 14 CBS report on Barak Obama's church's pastor and his statements saying we should blame the United States Government for the 9/11 attacks:

>"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the
>thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Wright
>said. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black
>South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done
>overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's
>chickens are coming home to roost."

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were done after entering a war that was already
raging and it was also done with the purpose to bring about and end to
the war. Every major action we have taken has been in response to
something else. We did not start WWII by dropping nukes, we ended it (or
at least part of it). As for the Palestinians, that war (yes, it is a
war) has been going on for the better part of two millenia. Plus, as far
as I know, Israel is our ally, not Palestine(which appears to be more a
group of people than a nation anymore). Regardless: we attack person A,
we attack person B, and then person C comes and attacks us without
warning and for no apparent reason.

>"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a
>three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no,
>God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn
>America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for
>as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

Not sure where he gets the "gives them the drugs" portion. Killing
innocent people is wrong, I agree with that. But if you want to quote the
bible why not bring out the part that has public stoning of adultery? Or
any of the other interesting punishments for crimes? Prison is a vacation
compared to what they should be getting. How many murderers sit in their
comfy cells with three meals a day, cable TV, and "recess" while the
victim's family cries for proper punishment? There are far to many crimes
out there where the punishment simply does not fit the crime. Life in
prison for murder? Far too soft in my opinion. The only thing he loses is
his freedom. They need to bring back the death penalty and properly
punish those that deserve it. Instead of building bigger prisons to hold
all the "lifers" just kill them off to make room for the new scum.
They're never going to leave anyway. Harsh? Perhaps.

But back on topic. This reverend person is stupid for even making these
remarks. Obama is right for denouncing these statements. The pastor is
only able to speak for himself. It takes other supporting him to give his
statements any weight at all. And Obama is not part of that. And I
applaud him for that. If I was in his position I might have done a little
more than denounce the statement but actually attack it. Bringing out the
flaws in the statements and letting everyone know without a doubt that I
do not support it.

Saying "No" is easy saying "No and here's the reasons why" is actually
saying something.