evolution creations

So most people that know me, know that every 2 weeks, a buddy of mine and I have our guys game night. So usually we’ll start around mid to late afternoon and wind up gaming through till the wee hours of the next day–usually stopping for an hour or two to refuel from some of the fine restaurants around us (that means greasy, fatty, and certainly not healthy, but damn good!).

On these gaming nights, we’ll play either MMORPG (Massively Multipleplayer Online Role Playing Games) or RTS (Real Time Strategy). In the recent past, our lineup has been some of the following games:

FlyFF
HellGate London
SilkRoad
GuildWars
Supreme Commander
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour

and for the most part it’s been good. But we are always looking for new games to play and expand our horizons. Generally we have been using the guideline that we are only interested in playing Only Purchase Once games or Free online MMORPG games as the subscription based games like World of Warcraft are just too expensive for my gaming habits (his are another story and he games ALOT!).

So we have found a new game for all you gamers: Universe at War. This is put out by a studio that I’ve not heard before (Petroglyph), but published by our good friends at Sega whom we all know and love from the days of the blue spikey haired speed demon! So the advertising for the game said it was for those who are interested in RTS games like StarCraft 2, but do not want to wait for that game to come out. And who can blame us, Blizzard has kept StarCraft 2 in the development pipeline for how many years? I think StarCraft 1 and Broodwars were both back in the mid-1990’s, so we are going on close to a decade since a new release. And the way that they have been developing StarCraft 2, everything is so very hush hush, and for the weekend warrior like myself, we need that instant gratification and gaming fix (we sound like a bunch of addicts!).

At any rate, back to Universe at War. This has turned out to be an AWESOME RTS game. I’ll compare it with Supreme Commander (SC) on a few points. First off, Supreme Commander is one of those games that is just fun. If you played the earlier versions of the game (now we are going back to the days of Total Annihilation here so hang tight), then you know that Supreme Commander is just TA on steroids. Bigger maps, more to build, more options, more strategies. In fact, Supreme Commander almost has TOO MUCH content. We find that our SC/SC:FA games will last in excess of 2 hours, and for game night, that is a HUGE amount of time! But that isn’t to say it isn’t fun, as it is, but you will find that your strategies become very massive and after awhile, everyone has so much in the game, that even the best systems will grind to a halt. The SC/SC:FA are designed to use multiple CPU processors so definitely go out and make sure that your system is dual-core or dual-proc/dual-core so you can run this game in all it’s glory. Also each race is basically a clone of each other, so the diversity in SC/SC:FA can sometimes be challenging. SC:FA does a better job at this as the races are a bit more unique.

Back to comparing SC/SC:FA to Universe at War. So in SC/SC:FA you have a lot of options and massive games, but in Universe at War those are skinned down to a more streamline style of play. You have your 3 races, but they are all drastically unique. One race is built for domination and brute force, the other on technology and mobility, and the last on energy. In many ways, Universe at War reminds me more of the original StarCraft in that each of those 3 races were all drastically unique and the style of your game play was also as equally unique.

If you have played Command & Conquer, you are probably someone who owns either now Command & Conquer: The First Decade, or have independently purchased most of the popular titles within the Command & Conquer (C&C) genre over the last decade. So it was with heavy hearts, that C&C3 was hyped up and when we purchased, installed, and played this game, we were nothing short of bummed out. First off, the maps are TINY! Whereas SC/SC:FA are probably too BIG, C&C3 is just too small to do anything. The game pretty much revolves around your ability to build quickly and rush your enemy as you will soon be fighting for the same tiberium resources because your bases are right next to each other. There are times when you wish Virtual Reality was a thing of the present, cause you could throw a rock from your base and hit your opponents base with ease. Also the game as a lot of cool weapons and builds, but you really never get a chance to use them. An average game will last less than 20 minutes in C&C3. In fact if I had to pick, I would say that of the C&C genre, C&C Generals: Zero Hour is probably my all time favor game to play (also there is a bug in the game where using Windows XP on LAN will crash your game unexpectedly, this has been fixed in Vista, and the game runs FLAWLESSLY–talk about BONUS!).

So in all, Universe at War is basically the middle ground between the two heavy hitter RTS, SC/SC:FA and C&C3. It has nice balance, the game play will last you on LAN with 2 enemies anywhere from 4o-90 minutes, the builds are numerous and within a class you have many various routes that you can take on the resource tree that will change the game drastically from game to game. The graphics are beautiful and the game takes full advantage of multi-core processors. There are a few small hickups in the game, but I expect the fine folks over at Petroglyph studios will be releasing patches quickly to address these issues, nothing major just some game glitches here and there–everything that you would expect from a new game. Who has had a game launch without patches or a few hickups–true gamers know this is to be expected and now shunned.

I would highly recommend that folks interested in RTS go out and purchase this game, whether it be for PC or Xbox360, you can play each other using the Microsoft Live feature, or you can play like I do and just amp up your internal network to a Gigabit connection, and periodically upgrade your gaming rig at the cost of your wife giving you that evil look that you love your computer more than you do her (of course not, but all you guys out there know what I’m talking about!).

So as you all know, I am a smoker. I didn’t start at the stereotypical age of under 18, some high school peer pressure, I hate my parents rebel act, but it started after my first semester in college and when I entered the work force. Let me tell you, that first job you get, makes you want to pull your hair out. Actually I can understand now why so many choose to stay in college and go from their undergraduate, to their graduate to their Ph.D–school is a safe zone that you are free to be creative and without any burdens of the real world expectations to produce and profit.

So I started with marlboro ultra lights, moved to lights, and then stuck it out through the home stretch on red’s or as they call them cowboy killers. As if smoking red’s somehow embodies the belief that you are strong as a cowboy and you are fighting against the odds to win where so many other daring cowboys had fallen. At any rate, I smoked those steadily through my various careers on through Hostway. Now that is interesting, as I became so much addicted to smoking, that I was going through a pack every few days. Now for some that isn’t a lot, but for me, that was a TON! So that went on for a few years. but I realized that slowly bits and pieces of myself were fading away–blowing away with the smoke and ash.

So I quit. At first I thought to myself that it was going to be harder than it really was, so I did the whole patch method. Boy does that not tell you some of the side effects! Let’s just say, stay close to the bathroom! So that got chucked out and I went cold turkey. And you know what, it wasn’t that hard. So I stayed off the horse for several months, and then work turned for the worst and things became difficult, and I got back on the horse. It’s funny what you go to when you are feeling stressed and under the pressure. Some people go to food, others to drinking, me to smoking.

So that lasted awhile longer and then I stopped again. This time I thought it was going to be for the long haul. But sure enough, Qwest Communications deal landed, and I was back on the horse! Let’s just say that as my time at Hostway started to spiral down the drain, I began to smoke more and more. So much in fact, that when I finally did leave Hostway and start with Lagan, I bought an entire carton of smokes with me to Belfast, thinking A) that everyone in Belfast smoked like chimneys and B) that I was going to also smoke like a chimney.

But you know what I found when I got there, that things weren’t at a point that they were for several months before. That I ended up smoking primarily out of habit, vs need. So you know what, when I got back to the States, I ended up quiting the habit. So as of today, I am now over a month off the horse and it feels—so so! Hey now, I can’t say it’s all joy and happiness as I’m hacking up a storm, but it does feel good again to not be burdened by the film and illness that is smoking. Hopefully this time it is for good, let’s hope and pray! So the New Years resolution has begun early, and let’s make it a good 2008!

So one of the biggest changes that has occurred this year is the number of companies that are going “green”. But what irritates me beyond all reason is the fact that going green doesn’t have a standardized meaning and utilization amongst all parties. For instance, I think that companies can achieve a more green status by:

1. Making use of ecologically friendly servers, i.e. servers that have lower power utilization and green manufacturing processes. In searching not that many companies have invested in this type of technology for their servers–it is my guess that people would consider servers to be like any other electronic hardware, turn it on and it works without any regard for how it works or what consumption is made on the post side of things, or what can be done to improve things on the pre and production side of things. My hats off to Dell for starting this, and I would say that I am looking for other companies to also follow suit.
1. Dell
2. Now that you are running green servers, you can utilize virtualization to reduce the over-all foot print of your server infrastructure to consolidate systems that can share hardware. Obviously you will have systems that cannot share hardware, such as database servers or web-servers, but if you are a small to medium size business, you can probably share things like your Active Directory server or LDAP server and email server on the same box. Also you can put virtual servers for your demo environments or staging environments on the same server. Potentially 4+ servers on one piece of hardware. Companies are leary to go to virtualization in their production environments, but when we consider how much of the server is being used at any given time, having more than 1 server hardware for these types of situations is a bit of an over kill if you ask me. I know from experience, that companies look to servers are a dime a dozen, instead of looking at ways that they can be consolidated or utilized in better balance, i.e. moving services from server to server and combining them with other services that have a better balance in server resources so the two services aren’t always fighting for processor time or RAM, etc.
3. Companies typically have different type of employee’s with different requirements in terms of hardware. But one thing that I haven’t seem occur that often is virtual workstations. This can be achieved by using hardware solutions, such as the solution offered by companies like NComputing. What’s really interesting about this type of solution, is when you put it into a contact center environment, where you have agents working at different times and maybe at different stations, the solution offered by NComputing offers both the portability that a user can move to any workstation (to play my own devils advocate, you can also achieve this by using network services on most major OS systems) but also you can reduce the over-all footprint of your hardware, as the need to have a workstation, monitor, keyboard, and mouse is reduced to just a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Also when it comes to the workstation footprint, you can have several agents share one physical computer, and this makes it easier to both manage the OS and users, as well as reducing power consumption, ability to have user’s plug in their own devices, such as USB or Firewire devices, and because you may pair agents on nodes based on their work schedules, you can balance the load on the servers to maximize your over-all productivity and resource availability. Ideally you want the systems to be working at 50% all the time (or higher), instead of having drastic peaks and valleys or periods where the system is just sitting there at 99% idle.
4. LCD’s vs CRT’s. With the reduced cost of LCD’s nowadays, companies should be getting rid of those bulky old CRT monitors and replacing them with Energy Star, high efficiency LCD screens. That is just the first part of the puzzle. The second part is more of a behavioral change, that is to change the behavior of each employee to make sure that they turn OFF their monitor at the end of the day. How many times have I been one of the last out of the office, and I walk by desk after desk where their monitors are left rendering the screen saver or some other silly thing. It’s a major change I grant you that, but if user’s do not get into the habit of being green themselves, then it is a single sided effort that rests on the companies shoulders unnecessarily.

In addition to the technology changes, companies should also make changes such as:

- Eliminate non-biodegradable cups and invest in getting employee’s reusable cups (microwavable) for their hot beverages, and water bottles for their cold beverages. This could also be an opportunity to slap the company logo on a few more things, as employee’s are generally open to getting more company labeled stuff, especially the free kind.

Granted these are simple things and there are tons more, but I think going through these types of exercises will only help to create a standard so that if a company saids that it is a green company, there is a lot of visibility as to what that means.

So today we went to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and I have to say I was not disappointed at all! I am a huge fan of this saga, and the second installation of National Treasure I would recommend for all who enjoyed the first one. A few things to point out. First, if you are looking for the sequel to be better than the first–don’t go see this movie. There are certainly aspects of this movie that are better than the first, but the story line in the first was obviously a lot more complex and complete. The story also provides intrigue and mystery, which isn’t to say that the second installment didn’t have that, but the story line isn’t as deeply ingrained in our history as the first. The Knights Templar is a myth that we think of when we think of the Arc of the Convanet or the Crusades, or Salamons Temple, etc. John Wilks Booth shooting Abe Lincoln and there being a mystery of a city of gold, sort of further into fiction than the first book.

Also I was expecting the story line involving Gates and his girlfriend to start up from where it left off–let’s face it they left it off fairly picture perfect, but there were additional rocky roads that were left that needed to be filled in.

Finally, we look at Poole, Gates’s side-kick of sorts, at the end of the first installment, was promised by Gates that if there was another treasure that altered the history of the world, that he would be able to determine the finders fee. In the second installment Gates mother is seen organizing the archeological expedition on the city of gold, but there isn’t anything about a finders fee or the reward, only that Poole gets his car back as an offer from the President of the United States.

All in all, a great story, but this is left wide open for a sequel as there is the mysterious page 47 in the Book of Secrets that Gates takes a picture of, and the President asks about at the very end. What does this all mean. I was thinking about this, and supposed that it might have to do with the assassination of James Garfield and the acts of Chester Author as the vice-president and perhaps to uncover the plot that Author used in conjunction with the Stalwart party to have Garfield assassinated. While the story is plausable, there isn’t a treasure necessarily. Perhaps the third installation will revolve around the gold at Fort Knox or something along those lines.

As we get closer to the holiday and the end of another year, I think to myself all the things that have happened in the past year, and what we should be all thankful for. I don’t think that we get the time necessarily as people to consider what we have and what we have worked towards. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why we always are seeking the next goal or objective, because we don’t have the talents or skills in place as ordinary people to look at things in terms of the here and now. What is it that we typically hear from the enlightened ones–that is to not know what is in your future, but to know what is in your past and present. It’s sort of this idea of self-actualization that leads to a better understanding of yourself, and ultimately can enable someone to progress forward.

I think this past year has been a year of challenges and growth. I look at myself and the people around me, and I see that there are some that have fallen behind, some that have excelled forward, and others still who have remained where they are in terms of growth and over-all wellbeing. We use the term wellbeing and we automatically assume that this means a health related wellbeing, something that can be measured through your temperature, or observed through a microscope, but instead wellbeing is more of a general state of things. It is to say that there is balance in what you do, where the various pulls within your life are not disproportionately distributed, but instead are in a balanced state that would be nicely visualized via a ying-yang symbol.

Symbols have for a long time represented what we feel or want to mean, but do not seem to have the words to describe it. In actuality, I think that as robust that our language is, we are still not at a point where we can fully describe in words what we feel. Perhaps this is why we are still battling the seemingless never-ending challenges of coding artificial intelligence. If we can’t adequately describe things in the real-world, who’s to say that we have the facilities to be able to do so virtually or in a way that will bring life to something that was created from nothing. When we talk about symbols, we look at things like the heart, or symbols of a crucifix, these are universally representative of things that we feel or believe, but do not have a complex explaination behind them. To each the symbols can mean and represent themselves as different things, and ultimately their meaning and the way that they impact our lives will also be different.

So to this end, I must say that I am fully geared up and ready to go to the first screening of National Treasure: Book of Secrets! I know, that long philosophical debate, and how can I lead up to a movie! In all actuality, I find myself being drawn to movies like this, because it doesn’t try to explain something to it’s fullest or make you believe that what they are showing you is true, but instead the idea or the thought that something larger, bigger, or more complex than what we are use to exists out there in the world today, and we probably walk by it 100 times a day and never realized it’s existence.

To finally to end this post, I do want to say, that my first drafts of my book will soon be available in bits and pieces as I work to complete it. I find myself in a state where I don’t know what to take on as a new life challenge, but I have always been drawn to the idea that writing something, creating something that others find engaging or interesting, would always be something that I am interested in, so we will see where this takes us!