Email: For the Lose?

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10 months ago
by george in

There’s no question about it. Today’s business world is driven by email. The digital age has brought about many fantastic new innovations, but underpinning it all is email. The simple tool that allows one person to asynchronously connect with another person to either share ideas, or ask questions, or provide input.

Alexandra Samuel over at the Harvard Business Review has a great article on It’s Time for a Vendetta Against Email. She goes into the article with two assumptions with email:

  1. If you’re working smartly and efficiently, you can appropriately process (read, file and/or respond to) every email you receive.
  2. It is unacceptable to ignore (i.e. not respond to) an email that implicitly or explicitly asks for a response.

I really like her point with number 1 as I agree that this is completely a false assumption. At some point you do run into the issue where the volume coming in is just too big for one person (TB41P). The second assumption also assumes that email is the only way to communicate as not getting a response is somehow detrimental to the process.

Instead I propose the following set of assumptions:

  1. Emails should be used to provide a baseline of information that can be referenced, but should never be used as a sole means of communication.
  2. Don’t be lazy and just send an email.

Sometimes the above assumptions don’t fit, i.e. in situations where you have a large amount of data to convey, say in a situation where your having to explain a situation or problem and logically it’s easier to write it out. However, the assumption on you the senders end should be that the email is a starting point for a discussion, one that may also be better suited for an in-person or over-the-phone conversation. Why have we become a society that assumes just because I’ve written it in an email that my writing is both understandable and clear and should be interpreted at face value? How many times have we been in situations where clarifications are made over emails because what was written, while it may be clear to the sender, is completely misread by the recipient(s)?

Some bad behaviors in email have enhanced people’s bad use of it. For example, the Reply All is one of the worst “features” of emails or email clients. For example, you have to send out an email to a wide audience, but then questions come back that should be targeted to smaller groups. What people have come to expect is that in that single email thread to the broader audience, side bar conversations also occur and soon what should have been a few emails in your inbox has piled up to be many tens of emails. At some point you see the next part of the thread come in and you just trash it with the thought, “if it was important someone will get back to me on that”. We’ve trained ourselves to this behavior and we expect it, all because of that pesky Reply All.

Instead the behavior that people should take is that while you can’t get away from wide audience emails, based on side bar conversations and redirections the sender or facilitator of the email, i.e. the person in the center of it all, should be using the forward and forward the email thread to the smaller audience or groups of people with specific questions that they respond back to and then you the sender stitch the responses back to the wider audience. The onus should be on the sender to feed the appropriate information to the people because essentially you are asking people to provide feedback and quite frankly they shouldn’t be expected to have to weed through a long thread to add their 2 cents. Now there is no question, this is a much more involved process, but the long run it means that as a recipient my piece in the thread may be one or two emails and then I’ll be dropped from the thread without any other thought of it.

Another feature that gets under my skin is the Important flag. It’s become normal business that if an email has the Important flag, that this somehow means it should be bumped up the priority list. When in fact most people will agree that if you see that flag, you are actually less inclined to read that message–especially if you have gotten an previous email from that sender with the Important Flag and in your mind you are thinking to yourself “gee wiz, why do I only get emails from that person with that flag?”. What I believe the intent of the flag is saying is that the contents of this email are time sensitive and therefore require immediate attention; however, the email going back to my first assumption, should be the vehicle for you to get some information to another person, but if it is time sensitive, then you the sender should take the time and call the recipient or walk over to their desk to follow-up on the email. If you can’t take the time out as a sender, then why is it so important as a recipient to move my time around to get to your lazy request?

This goes back to my second assumption. Email has made us lazy. What should have been used as a tool to help better record keeping and information management, has turned into a CYA (cover your a**) tool to be able to say that you told someone something and it is there fault/responsibility for not getting back in a timely fashion.

The fact remains that the sender has removed themselves as the primary stakeholder in the email process. Obviously as a sender something was important enough for you to sit down, think of an email, and send it to someone else; however, currently senders see emails as a “send it and forget it” tool. Senders need to own the process from start to finish, if you send something out, have enough invested to make sure that you get something back. If your email isn’t responded to, don’t send out a second email, call the person up. Talk with them. Nine times out of ten you’ll find out that the recipient is probably in a TB41P situation and you just were the white noise in their inbox. In fact if you look at it that way, you as a sender have caused that person more grief, so thanks a lot of that!

The previous business mentality has it that calling someone or going up to them in the office and asking a question is somehow more disruptive than an email. The idea behind this stems from the belief that if you send an email, then it’s asynchronous and the person can look at it if/when they have time to. But the reality of it is that studies have shown [source] that interruptions caused by emails can take that person on average a minute to recover their train of thought. How is that any less disruptive than calling them or walking up to them? To me this is a 6 of one half dozen of the other. Either way questions and answers have to be discussed. But if emails are piling up, don’t add to the problem just because you acknowledge that the problem is there. Use alternative means. Sometimes a phone call or discussion can be the break in the day that the person needs? So its just not a Q&A session but you can have a conversation about something and build better relationships with the people that you work with. Looking at my work life, I personally like it more when a customer calls me to ask questions or when people internally call me to discuss something either as a follow-on to an email or in place of an email.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating a shift as it just means that work that would come in as emails now causes your phone to ring non-stop; however, there is a balance and this balance you have to figure out.

My recommendations would be on threads that seem like they are going to take a long time to discuss with several moving parts, i.e. a topic that involves multiple groups or departments, organize a scrum call and get everyone who needs to be on to provide feedback on the call. Then start with the low hanging fruit and get the information out of those individuals and let them off the call. Slowly but surely the number of people on the call will dwindle and you will be able to collect all the information you need and not have to tie up all those people’s inbox for something you got resolved in the course of an hour. This to me is a much better use of time and in the end a faster way to get to the end.

Also some emails can just be ignored. Seriously. Just cause someone sends you an email doesn’t mean that you have to respond. Even if they ask for a response. The fact of the matter is that we all have too many emails to worry about. TL:DR, get to the emails you know you need to get to, and the others can wait until the pots not boiling over with more important stuff. Ideally you want to get to a zero base, but realistically in a high email volume world that we live in the reality is this is probably not a realistic goal. You have to take steps to put fences around your email and encourage better behavior by making use of other means of communication.

And for goodness sake, poke your head out above your computer screen and use your inter-personal skills more.

 

 

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Battle of the Tablets

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10 months ago
by george in

Remember a few years ago, the tech community was raving about the netbook? Yes remember those? Well if you were in the camp who jumped on that bandwagon and bought a netbook, shame on you! This year, the rave is definitely all about the tablet.

There are really 3 types of tablets on the market: Android, Windows, and Apple. Yes, I did say Windows. Most of you are fairly aware of the iPad/iPad2, enough said. And now with the explosion of Android-based tablets running Honeycomb (Android 3.x), these types of tablets are going to be a tsunami for consumers this year to have different sizes and configurations (i.e. Samsung Tab 10.1 vs 8.9). But the device that I don’t think has had enough said about it is the Windows Slate device.

What is my pushing point to getting a tablet? The following is my basic criteria:

  • Long lasting battery life, what good is a tablet if you have to charge it every few hours of use?
  • Large amount of available software
  • Ability to handle traditional business documents, i.e. Word/Excel/PPT
  • Handwriting and Handwriting translation
  • Large screen (I need something bigger than the current Samsung Tab)
  • Lightweight

Now this list might seem like I’m asking for too much, but in reality most tablets are either there or aspiring to be there on most fronts. For example, the gold standard of tablets in terms of battery life is to have > 8 hours of use. I can deal with that as that should take me through the majority of my day. Most are on the verge of or are currently extremely lightweight.

But where are current tablets lacking? I would say it’s with the handwriting and translation. Neither iPad nor Android based tablets deal with this in a very good way.

Bring in the Windows Slate. This uses the same handwriting and translation that Windows tablet users have come to love. Through the use of OneNote you get all the benefits of pen/paper in a digital format. Bring in 2011 technology and the form factor has shrunk considerably. I recall the days of the tablet convertible which was essentially a laptop with a screen that could lay flat facing up.

The one draw back that I see with the current Windows Slate device is the battery life. Since the device is essentially running Windows 7, I am assuming that there are a lot of processes that are running all the time. With that, the battery life on the device is only about 3 hours. That’s just bad, considering the landscape the other devices are able to play in.

TL-DR: I will wait until Generation 2 of the Slate and either go with that, or by then Android will have caught up with handwriting and translation and I will go with an Android device instead.

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Razer Orochi vs Microsoft Notebook 5000

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10 months ago
by george in

I’m what you would call a fanatic when it comes to computer hardware and accessories. Always looking for the next best thing and I’m certainly someone who likes to take the risk and find out for myself what a product is all about–at times this is a detriment!

I have had the Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 for some time now. There are several things that I really enjoy about this mouse:

  • Comfortable, one of the best feeling mouse I’ve used
  • Battery life, great as long as you remember to turn it off
  • Laser not optical

But the mouse has some issues with the Bluetooth stack or hardware on my laptop and periodically disconnects and reconnects. Kind of annoying.

It is because of the later issue that I sought to get a replacement. Mind you nothing was really wrong with this mouse, but I wanted to find something that had higher responsiveness, quieter mouse wheel scrolling, and less issues with Bluetooth and connectivity.

Bring in the Razer Orochi Gaming Mouse. Let me start out by staying what a cool looking device! Something right out of a science fiction movie, like a Cylon futuristic mouse of sorts.

Now this was a situation where I saw multiple purposes. Since the mouse is targeted as a gaming mouse, my initial thought was that I could use this for both my desktop gaming mouse (yes, thinking about World of Warcraft again!) as well as for my work laptop. Multi-purpose equals win!

Wrong. First off lets look at the positives.

  • Smooth scrolling
  • Detachable USB cord so you can game wired and also use it via Bluetooth
  • Constantly connected, nice connectivity to current problematic Bluetooth hardware/stack.
  • Adjustable speed controls
  • Uses AA batteries vs AAA batteries
  • Blue Laser works on more surfaces, better response

Now you would think that those would be worth the upgrade. I certainly initially thought the same. But after using it for awhile, one very large issue came to light–the mouse was REALLY REALLY uncomfortable to use for long periods of time and really did feel right when gaming.

From a gaming perspective, I’m comparing this to the Logitech G5, which if you know anything about the mouse is longer, wired, and weighted. These all make for comfortable use and in a 3 hour raid situation comfort is paramount! And while working with the mouse via Bluetooth, I found myself not getting a comfortable feel (this is all subjective mind you as others hands and use may be completely different) and would be literally painful to use for long periods of time.

All in all, I decided to go back to my trustworthy Microsoft Notebook 5000 mouse and ditch the Orochi. I find this to be a shame, but alas so is the risk with upgrading to the latest thing that has looks over function!

 

 

 

 

 

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Raid Leading 101: Starting Out

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11 months ago
by george in

As most people know I recently left the progression raiding guild <Revenge> on Shandris, and moved into <Fault Line> on Shandris. The motivations for this vary quite a bit, but raiding and more importantly raid leading was one of the major factors to making this change.

Little did I know that based on my performance within the small number of raids that I had gone into with Fault Line, that I would be asked to start raid leading.

So I start on a quest to look at raid leading and sharing my thoughts and experiences as I embark on this journey.

Let me start out by saying–I’m terrified. Rightfully so. This is a huge amount of responsibility and leadership as now the fate and success of 9 other people hinge on your ability to see them through the fight and in the end get a kill. No pressure right!

Let me start out with style. This one is fairly paramount as there is a wide and varying degree of styles out there and certainly I will first start off by saying that there is no right or wrong way that I have seen to manage your raids. Style is largely dependent on your raid composition. And like in business where you have to communicate to your audience, you need to raid lead in the best way that will reach the most number of people within your raid party. For example, you may find yourself with a military background and use to people seeing you in a position of authority and just start barking out orders and expect everyone to have “done their part”. If your DPS you damn well DPS, Healers heal whoever is taking damage, Tanks, a.k.a. Meatshields batten down the hatches and get ready for the beating! To a large and fairly reasonable degree, people do need to recognize that there is individual ownership in what they bring to the raid; however, it is the job of the raid leader to take that composition and to see how best to leverage those skills for the kill.

It has been my experience that people, both in game and in real life, do not take well to brow beating, negative reinforcement, and other harsh tactics. Yes, is it necessary at time to be stern or direct to the point and yes at times border on hurting someone’s feelings? The short answer to that is yes. But you need to also recognize that part of the individual motivations that drive everyday people to raiding is not an intrinsic benefit, i.e. you aren’t paying them to raid (for the most part and excluding professional raiding guilds like Paragon!). People need to know that their opinions matter and that there is a collaborative environment that is based on trial and error and making the call to move forward.

To this end I would suggest that based on my management background and what I’ve seen work and not work in game, my preference would be to see and treat raid leading like a project manager. Ultimately the success of failure of your project, a.k.a. the raid encounter, rests on your shoulders; however, it is not your job to do all the DPS, nor is it your job to do all the tanking, nor is it your job to do all the healing. Each role has their own subject matter experts and you need to identify who they are and be clear in what they need to do and let them then have the autonomy to say well based on the mechanics of the fight, I’m going to have to do X, Y, and Z based on my class/spec to achieve my individual contribution to the whole.

Create an environment that is based on performance and progression and not on a blame system. I look at systems that are used in the business world, such as SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) as a way to quickly assess a wipe and understand what changes need to be made. And this is two fold: first, it needs to be understood where the weaknesses and threats are, and second, to determine which adjustments are going to be made. For example, if you wipe on Halfus the reason why could be any number of things, i.e. your tanks didn’t rotate cool downs, your interrupt teams didn’t interrupt the Shadow Nova’s, your healers are not up to par in taking expected damage, your dps stood in fire, the adds were not going down fast enough, etc etc etc. You need to look at the whole list and quickly prioritize to know what seems to be the most significant reason for the wipe and adjust those few things. I would urge against making a large degree of changes here as it becomes more and more challenging to understand what the underlying cause of each wipe is due to the number of moving parts from pull to pull. Simple acronym, P.U.T, Pull, Understand, Test.

  1. Pull knowing the mechanics of the fight and see what happens. If the mechanics are followed, 9 times out of 10 that might be your kill shot.
  2. Understand what wiped the group. Ask for participation in understanding why each person died, especially those early on in a fight, and match those to the mechanics to see if something was missed. Did someone die because the interrupts were missed? Or was avoidable damage not being avoided? Or is there not enough healing for expected damage?
  3. Test, whatever the small list of top changes are, communicate out what the issue was, what the change is, and what the expected results should/might be. People aren’t robots, if they don’t know why they are changing something or what benefit it might have, its harder to get them to actually do it.

Highlight to your raid members what the strengths were. Each attempt should be further progression to a boss kill.

  • Did the healers do a good job in coping with the healing to the point of the wipe? Let them know that?
  • Were there good behaviors that were exhibited that need to be made visible to the rest of the group so that, i.e. someone called something out when they weren’t asked to do that, but that helped the raid group to adjust quickly and prevent a premature wipe.

I stress the second point above as this is critical in building a foundation for a team that is on trust, open communication, and mutual respect as you want to promote and nurture behavior that is constructive and behavior that you want replicated. Focus on the positives as negatives can have a detrimental effect on the raid. Yes, we all know we wiped. There isn’t any reason to belabor that point. But if we focus on how we could have had a boss kill and highlighting the good behaviors that we saw, people will become more confident in their own actions and look or seek out ways to do more of the good stuff and hopefully be less prone to do the bad. We use this in business all the time and we all know work environments that are toxic as those environments are all about the “gotchas” verses promoting the behaviors we do want to see repeated.

Don’t try to be a hero. As a raid leader, it is not your job to carry everyone. It’s your job to know what you have to work with, both in terms of the boss and abilities and with your raiders, but then let what happens happen and adjust based on what the deltas are. You can’t control every aspect, people WILL and are BOUND to do stupid stuff. But let them own that and don’t try to think that you can single handedly control every element of the raid as if it was a chess game.

Do your homework. This is probably the most important element of being a raid leader. Knowing the boss mechanics is essential. Watch the videos, understand what’s happening and what things we need to watch out for and plan. This is your responsibility to know this and your raiders, while they should know the fight, need to know what strategy we will be using to address the mechanics and how this raid group will take those many strategies that are out there, and apply it to this particular boss kill. I take Magmaw as an example. For some raid groups, its easier to have everyone stack in melee range of Magmaw on the opposite side as the tank and then 2 people at ranged (off tank and ranged DPS, usually a hunter) who will receive the Pillar of Flames and then kite the adds around. Other raid groups will have a loosely stacked ranged pile (everyone stays a few yards apart) and will only move when the Pillar of Flames is dropped on the group and move to the other side of the room and DPS down the adds. Neither one of these strategies is the quote on quote right or wrong way to do this fight; however, it would be argued that the second teaches the raid how to better move for these types of abilities verses just standing there in one big pile in melee while only 2 people kite the Pillar of Flames.

Patience. You are working with people, and not just a person, but a group of people who have to learn how that will fight and work well together in a group and what works the best for them. After or getting up to the 3 hour mark everyone is tired. But that doesn’t mean that you slack and let the mood of the raid go south or negative. It just means that it’s been a long night, work has to be done to understand what went wrong and adjust for the next night. Patience is paramount and must be key throughout the entire raid encounter. When the raid leader gets impatient, people tend to make more mistakes because they are feeding off of that impatience and they become more careless themselves.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to leave them! I’ll try and put up more posts as I get further along in this journey.

 

1st Amendment, a Teachers Blog, and Sanity

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11 months ago
by george in

I recently came across this article, where English teacher Natalie Munroe is under attack over words that were written on her personal blog presumably about her dealings with students are Central Bucks School District.

Now at first I thought to myself, this is just wrong. Someone in a position like this shouldn’t be blogging about her students.

But as I got into the article, it dawned on me that the intent of Natalie may not be to blog negatively about the students, but in fact look at things from two perspectives; how the school districts are failing to keep up with students who are showing more and more ways to circumvent the system and how as a teacher, a teacher is not able to take actions appropriate to making progress.

Let’s look at these two perspectives. The first comes with comments that were highlighted from her blog about students being “lazy”, “sneaky”, and “rude”. Well at face value you can think that she’s talking about students directly, but I think the underlying issue here is that she’s commenting on the growing lack of interest that students are having for their own education. How they are not active participants in their own success. How parents are allowing or relying on school districts to teach their children and they themselves are not taking responsibility for being parents.
More and more I see this happening, and while it’s been quite a few years since I’ve been in high school, the things that I see kids doing or not doing and the attitudes they have to teachers, adults and their own future are just shocking. Students nowadays seem to expect or want things to be given to them and regardless of the outcome there aren’t any consequences for failure. If you don’t fail, you can go to summer school. Or if you get a bad grade, your parents will come and make a stink and get that changed by going over the teachers head. Or students who use tricks and other things to game the system and not actually learn but take the easy way out. There is less comprehension and more memorization. Standard tests don’t push our students, but instead pigeon hole them to a standard. We teach and test kids in math and science, and yet we are seeing more and more students having problems reading and writing and being otherwise decent people–I call this the soft skills that should also be taught and not just curriculum.

And teachers, while they are expected to be the ones who teach students, they cannot create their own curriculum nor can they bring out the talents of some students and let them rise above others. My point would be if someone wants to learn, teach them! If someone doesn’t let them fall. But yet we foster this belief in America that “No Child is Left Behind”. It should be ok that students who aren’t performing or behaving or otherwise a distraction to the learning process should be left behind. This is just survival of the fittest. It seems apparent that the “cool” thing to do nowadays is to be the life of the party, friends, parties, social lives. When is being smart and doing well not cool? How are you going to succeed in life without a brain? Or do you think that your good looks and ability to talk your way out of a situation will let you succeed? What I think here is that a teacher was frustrated that no matter what, they are not given the tools to deal with the problems with the students.

Where else do you turn? As a teacher, especially and English teacher, I would assume that writing is a cathartic experience. Writing on the internet and not highlighting specific names or events shouldn’t be frowned upon. It should be celebrated. This is a way to get stuff out into the open to talk about the issues–not punish those who are the whistle blowers.

Throughout the entire article there seems to be sympathy for the kids, but I ask, where’s the sympathy to the teacher who has to put up with a failing system and students who are more concerned about social lives than taking on the responsibility of being the next generation of thinkers and leaders and innovators. At the rate we are going, America is going to be known as the party nation, fixated on entertainment, quick fixes, drugs, and consumer driven markets. We will stop producing anything and our people will be nothing more than the open mouth for the world to feed into.

This should be a catalyst to talk about the issues, and for teachers to wake up! It’s no longer about teachers banding together in unions and protecting themselves, but finding out ways to take the kids who want to make something of their lives and give them all the tools to do that. For the ones who won’t to be moved onto trades and other labor type jobs that will put them to work physically and not have a great deal of mental requirements. To enable teachers to teach, and not to regurgitate information that is signed with the seal of approval like a piece of USDA Grade A beef. Kids are dynamic, each one learns differently and each one has different abilities and interests. Not everyone should go to College and certainly not everyone should be taught in the same ways. Kids need to have learning tailored to them and also failure should be accepted as a way to let someone know that they need to do better and not a point of argument where someone can say “My Jimmy should have never gotten this grade!”. My response to that is if your child should have received a higher grade why didn’t they? And if they didn’t apply themselves on test day, they should earn their grades and be satisfied with the ones they got with the intent that next time they will do better.

I look around my neighborhood at kids in middle school and high school, with their general lack of social graces, superiority complex, and generally ignorant way of looking at life and ask myself, how are these people going to make it? How are we going to put the future of the world in these people’s hands? The fact remains that more and more we are dumbing down our education system to ensure that the highest number of people succeed, instead of saying how do we make it so competitive that only a portion of students WILL EVER succeed, and the rest need to look at other options to bolster their future, such as trades and arts and other forms of intellect that take advantage of their abilities, or in most/some cases their disabilities. We don’t like to think of kids as being disabled in learning, but the fact remains that some kids will never be good at math or science, and perhaps have a higher intelligence in other area’s. If we don’t have a way of identifying that and pushing a kid into that direction, we will forever waste time and effort trying to keep these kids mixed in with those who will exceed and succeed.

 

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Welcome Prius

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11 months ago
by george in

This past Saturday the 19th, we decided to go car shopping. Our main intent was just to test drive the various cars out there as our lease on my Mazda CX-7 was coming up the first week in April, so we figured that now was the time to start looking for the next vehicle. We were not expecting to buy anything!

The first stop of the day was Wilkin’s Mazda in Elmhurst, IL. Seeing how the Mazda lease was through Wilkins and our previous lease on a Mazda 6 was also through Wilkin’s they certainly deserved the opportunity to show us what they had. Our test drive that morning was with the Hyundai Sonata, Genesis, and Mazda 6.

One of the main drivers to the next vehicle lease was fuel economy. Currently the Mazda CX-7 has about a 16.5 gallon gas tank, and the way I drive, I was getting about 280-290 miles to the tank. Since the car also required premium gas, lets call that $3.30 on average, the cost per mile to drive the CX-7 was about $.18 per mile. Obviously this is pretty terrible in this day and age and especially considering that most would agree that in the next 1-2 years the price per gallon of gas will easily move into the $4.00 range.

Secondary to fuel economy are the features of the car. I was less concerned about performance this go around as I knew that performance was going to be the direct trade off to improve fuel economy (sad face!). Some of the major features we were looking for were:

  • Moonroof
  • Backup Camera
  • Auto dimmer rear-view mirror
  • Homelink
  • Bluetooth phone/audio integration
  • Low in-cabin noise

I had argued with myself about whether options such as leather would make or break the deal. I reasoned that it wouldn’t. In hindsight, I do wish that automakers would give up on their navigation systems. I more than prefer using Google Navigation over any on-board system for a few reasons.

  1. You don’t pay for updates. With most on-board systems, they use DVD’s to store points of interests, routes, and map data. Typically these are updated each year and require a cost to obtain them (usually in the several hundreds of dollar range). Google Navigation is free and updates are on-going.
  2. Cost, usually the onboard navigation will add several thousand dollars to the price of the car.

Since the backup camera is a must, I would prefer an option where I could have an LCD screen for the onboard functions and backup camera, but that did not have the navigation built in. That would help save additional costs, but alas, this doesn’t seem like the case with most car makers to decouple the two.

The last criteria is new to the list, and that is to ensure that the in-cabin noise levels are relatively low. To see this I downloaded the decible app [source] and used this to monitor audio levels in the car at idle, driving through the street, and highway. While I went in with the understanding that the app was not all that accurate, it was more objective than me just trying to determine if there was more or less noise in the cabin between vehicles as I previously had tried (and failed miserably at).

Needless to say, the Sonata and Genesis drive like champs, had all the features. The only downsides were the fuel economy as neither really had impressive numbers. I was anxious at the upcoming Sonata hybrid, but sadly was told that Wilkin’s would only have one in April. Even so, they hybrid would only have 35city/40highway, which for a hybrid aren’t that good.

Our plan for the day was to also test drive the Toyota Prius and the Audi A3. The A3 was the wild card as with diesel the fuel economy would have been better, but still at 30city/41highway, this was very similar to the Sonata hybrid and not really the numbers we were looking for.

Then we came to Dan Wolf Toyota in Naperville, IL. We had previously purchased from them a few years ago, so we knew them and they us. Going into the visit, my thoughts were that we were just going to test drive, then we would go test drive the A3 down the street. But secretly in the back of my mind the Prius was at the top of my list to begin with.

After the test drive, we were really excited about the ride and feel, and just had to get pricing. After an afternoon of negotiating, wouldn’t you know it, we drove off the lot with a new Prius!

Now lets look at the features, we opted for a Prius 3 with all the features. Unfortunately because of the lease, financing on the Prius 4 to get leather seats was just going to be an unrealistic jump in monthly cost for relatively low returns. Some of my favorite features are:

  • Solar fan, nice way to cool off the car during the summer heat.
  • Fuel economy, 51city/48highway, enough said!
  • Bluetooth everything. Easy to pair my Vibrant and PaDeu’s Blackberry to the car.

Now some observations. The first thing is bluetooth. One of my pet peeves is the countless number of CD’s that I seem to collect in my car. These are burns that I make from MP3′s that I download from Amazon. It seems like based on the day of the week or what activity we are going to do, I want to make a separate burn for that. I will also go on record saying I hate CD’s as I see this as a purely obsolete technology. Also I equally hate the iPod as this is a device with only one purpose and is more clutter than anything else. I was originally under the expectation that the car would support Bluetooth pairing to the phone so we could take calls in the car; however, I was pleasantly surprised that the car supported Bluetooth 2.1+ so we could get audio through the phone as well. Now this was where I was over the moon! Since we both have data plans, this means that we can stream Pandora through our phone and play directly over the car audio through Bluetooth so no wires! WIN! This has to be my favorite short term feature as with Pandora we pretty much have an endless stream of music with variations through our playlists and Pandora’s amazing music DNA.

For anyone who knows me, I LOVE to drive. When I drive, I get into the zone and I love to drive FAST! And not just fast, but I do drive on the more aggressive side (safely!). These propensities were just taunted with the CX-7 as they allowed me to indulge in all of these areas. Now there are some really obvious dangers here. First off, the changes in Illinois to the way that they handle speeding, i.e. in 2011 if you are 30mph over the posted limit, this is a CLASS B misdemeanor with a top penalty of 6 months in jail and a fine of $1,500. In the cast where your speeding over 40mph over the posted limit, this is a CLASS A misdemeanor with up to 1 year in jail and a fine of $2,500!!!!! For me, this just made the cost of driving the way I like to completely too high. Also obvious is the fact that driving this way could also result in an accident and fatalities.

Bring in the Prius. The first thing I noticed driving the car was the game. The car tells you how efficient you are driving, so the intent here is to tune your driving to maximize the fuel economy. This sounds silly, but for me who loves competition and games, this was intriguing. This is a direct feedback mechanism that will tell a driver, “Hey if you drive better you save!”. And since this is in real-time you can adjust your driving moment to moment. Now why is this important? Because one of the side-effects to driving the Prius that I immediately noticed was my desire to drive to maximize fuel. And a byproduct of that is I end up driving slower. I tend to have more gentle starts, coast more or coast up to a stop, stay at or under the posted limit as lower speeds means I can maintain more on the electric engine and rely less on the gas. I was absolutely blown away at the effectiveness that this has had to my driving style. If someone was to tell me before buying the Prius that this would happen, I would have told them NO! But speaking as a converted, the Prius was just what I needed to slow down.

We’re still trying to fine tune our driving to maximize our fuel economy and I’ll post a historical view of what our mileage is and cost of fuel and how far we were able to go over the next few months as I’m just as exciting to share this data with everyone!

Restoration Druid Defensive Healing Cooldown

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11 months ago
by george in

In a recent post, Blizzard suggested to the possibility that there may be the need to look at restoration druid and shaman’s to get a defensive cooldown to bring them up to other healer classes [source]:

We agree with the sentiment among some players that Restoration druids and Restoration shaman are lacking in the healing cooldown department. The shaman buff and Power Word: Shield adjustment above should bring all healers reasonably close in terms of throughput. The decision on who to bring then might end up being dictated by the strong cooldowns offered by paladins or priests. This isn’t the kind of thing we can address via a hotfix, but it is something we are looking at for the next major content patch.

Here’s a list of possible suggestions:

  1. AoE Barkskin, your able to click on Barkskin and an AoE circle appears. You can then drop that circle on top of your raid members and it will apply barksin on them.
  2. Targetable Barkskin, make it so Barkskin can be put on a target other than the druid.
  3. Holy Radiance style Barkskin, for 10 yards around the druid when Barkskin is popped, they get the same effects.
  4. Resto Treants, this is my favorite idea. Restoration druids should get the ability to summon treants. The three treants would then run around the raid and look for the players who are the lowest in HP and heal them up for half of the HPS that the druid is currently doing for 15 seconds (including HoTs and direct heals).
  5. Healing mushrooms. Make it so I can toss mushrooms around the raid and when triggered they bloom and AoE heal the raid members within 10 yards of the mushroom.

Obviously there are a lot of options here! I hope they have a bit of fun with it.

Ardent Defender and Why I Love This Ability

0
11 months ago
by george in

Back in the days of WoTLK, paladin tanks loved having the saving grace of Ardent Defender. Back then, this ability was your get out of jail free card as it would restore health if your health dropped. As a healer I came to rely on this to bail a tank out of trouble if we knew that we couldn’t hit the tank with a heal to bring them out of the red in time.

Fast forward to Cataclysm and the QQ that seems to be going on is that Ardent Defender is BROKEN! OH NO! Yes we’ve all heard this, and for awhile I was in the same camp that this was just not right. Why fix it if it wasn’t broken?

Now that we are effectively into Cataclysm, I look back on Ardent Defender and my experiences thus far as a paladin tank and take another look at this fundamental question–is Ardent Defender still broken?

My resounding answer to this is no. My first rational is our health pools. Ardent Defender was very useful in the case where a tank had about 40-60k HP, but now with our health pools around 150-200k, this seems less useful. Secondly we need to look at our mechanics, in particular the block cap mechanic. If a paladin is properly geared, the incoming damage should be flattened to prevent “bursty” damage spikes. This allows for healers to better cope with incoming damage and the raids have been configured to adjust for this. The days of a near one-shot to a tank purely based on RNG are pretty much over. The raids are composed so that you know when damage is going to be coming in, which is avoidable, and the net should be that the tank shouldn’t go from full to empty in the span of a second.

With that being said, I look at our toolkit and how we use this in 5-man instances as well as raids (10-man). First, the change to Ardent Defender now makes this a viable rolling cool down to help add additional mitigation of incoming damage. If we look at what’s available to mitigate damage, I see:

  1. Trinkets, such as those on Use will increase dodge, parry, resistance, or block.
  2. Ardent Defender, 20% mitigation of incoming damage for 10 seconds. 3 min cooldown. The bonus here is that if you pop Ardent Defender and the next attack will kill you, you will be healed to 15% your total health.
  3. Divine Protection, 20% mitigation for 10 seconds. 1 min cooldown.
  4. Guardian of the Ancient Kings, 50% mitigation for 12 seconds. 2 min cooldown.

Now while some would argue that it’s better not to have to click something, back to the whole get out of jail free ability, I would argue that I would rather have a cooldown that allows straight mitigation on-demand. Rolling cooldowns is required for all 5man or 10man content in Cataclysm. The ability to use Divine Protection to help mitigate damage and then be able to hit Ardent Defender if there is another unforeseen damage spike, helps in overall survivability. Since it has a longer cooldown, it should be used sparingly, but nonetheless I believe it has a much better use now in Cataclysm as a rolling cool down for damage mitigation.

In the end, as a rolling cooldown, I find myself using this a lot more now and the usefulness is definitely there compared to before where it was only used if I was about to die. Ardent Defender still does do this, but now instead of using it to prevent death, I use it to smooth over damage spikes that are coming in. As I said before, the key to Cataclysm is no longer stamina, but the block cap to ensure that damage has less spikes and is more level. Constant damage is more manageable to heal through than burst damage like what we see from encounters like Nimeron in Ulduar  where the changes of a tank dying due to 1 hit is virtually certain.

May the light shine down and smile on LFD

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11 months ago
by george in

Since I have come back to World of Warcraft, I have known of the Looking for Dungeon (LFD) tool in game. Previously in vanilla you use to have to gather a group together from people on your server that usually resulted in a slow process, but the benefits there was that it forced people on the realm to come together in common friendship and purpose to take down content! In many ways, veteran players would argue that LFD was the death of the realm as people on the realm no longer shared in the same common goals as rarely will you now see in trade a request to get a realm group together for a heroic dungeon.

Today comes news that many of the complaints that players have in the LFD tool have been heard and will be addressed through new hotfixes. Some of my complaints are:

  1. Sometimes a player DC’s or otherwise is slow to zone in because they are in the middle of something and you can’t seem to kick them because of some ridiculous timer.
  2. Tank instant queues are just over powered! And people were abusing this power by having a tank queue with them (usually a DPS) for those instant queues and then drop group whenever the instant popped. This meant that the now formed group would be tankless and would be moved to the front of the line for the next available tank. Still a wait, but now that DPS only has to wait a few minutes vs 30+ minutes.
  3. Guild or friends grouping together for an LFD. This is a double edged sword as on one hand I think it’s great when players group together with guildies and friends to run a dungeon; however, the ugly reality is that this is abused and at times very harshly. I’ve seen groups of guildies or friends who just berate the 5th person for all their mistakes, or after a long dungeon will kick that person because they make up 80% of the group so that they can invite someone from their realm to join them to take down the last boss or any number of permutations of this abuse.

To this end, it seems that our prayers have been answered and the folks over at Blizzard have decided to do something about this. Clearly the eroding sentiment of the LFD does warrant action be taken to stabilize this tool and make it more mutually enjoyable to people who need it/use it. Some of the major changes that will be brought through via a hotfix are [source]:

  • Players who are outside a dungeon for more than a few minutes are now immediately able to be kicked.
  • If queuing as a group with a tank or healer, and the tank or healer drops group (or is kicked) soon after joining, those that queued with them will also be removed from the dungeon.
  • If three or more players group queue with each other it will require an additional vote for them to kick anyone they did not group queue with.
  • If a group queue of 4 kicks the one person that they did not group queue with they will each receive a more severe penalty to their ability to initiate future kicks.
  • If someone initiates a vote kick for someone they group queued with they will not incur a penalty to their ability to initiate future kicks.

“And he looked upon what he created and said it was good.” This is all I can say. These are much needed changes that I think will dramatically improve the overall quality of LFD life. Needless to say I can imagine there will still be some gaming to this; however, overall I think it will impress upon everyone the need for some common sense when using the LFD.

First, LFD is a tool, one that carries a commitment. You queuing have committed that barring any real life emergency you are committing to the group of 4 other people whom you do not know, that you have the time to finish it out.

Second, patience is a virtue, and when using LFD should be bottled up and carried with you in stacks of 100 to be used in 1-5 minute increments. Players seem to think that dungeons should be easy and mistakes will not happen. This is simply not true. Wipes will happen, things won’t go the way you want them to, players will abruptly D/C, you may not have the right composition of CC in the group, your DPS may be fresh out of ilevel333 boot camp and kinda suck, your tank may have lost his map and threw the GPS out the window, your healer may have forgotten spirit and as a result is searching for the lost mana–clearly any number of reasons that your patience may wear thin. However, this is no excuse or reason for patience to not be there. I tell you WoW players, if you are short of patience, stop using the LFD to play with PuG’s. Head to your realm and get players there, or within your guild so that you play with 5 people you know and can count on to do their part.

Third, play other classes. What you say? Anyone who plays DPS should create a tank character and tank heroics or a healer character and heal heroics. A tank should create a healer character. A healer should create a tank or DPS character. It’s my firm belief that when players pigeon hole themselves into a class, they become frustrated because in their view their job may be to just “blow shiit up”. Or a tank who doesn’t look out for their healer by not using cooldowns, crowd controlling, self-heals, mechanics, or where the healers mana is at. Or a healer who can’t keep up with known damage that the group will be taking (not taking into account any avoidable damage that should be avoided). By playing the roles of others, or walking a mile in their shoes, people will become more forgiving as they will understand that the job of the group is to finish. Your contributions while important are certainly not singular. As a team you need to work together to get the common goals finished.

Any questions, see my second point in the previous paragraph. Still not sure, Ctrl + Alt + Delete on your computer and restart. Keep doing this until you figure it out =).

Is hyper-miling the answer to our car needs?

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11 months ago
by george in

For many years now we’ve heard the changes in the automotive landscape. The messages tell us that the answer to our oil dependency lies in electric cars. And to that end we’ve seen countless hybrid, plug-in electric, or extended range electric cars hit the consumer market.

In all of these types of cars we see some major drawbacks:

  1. Hybrid, these types of vehicles have many limits. For one, they make use of traditional internal combustion engines and add an electric engine on top of the existing cars weight. This makes for a heavier vehicle and more complexity in the overall drive system as you have both an internal combustion and electric engine that could go wrong. For example, taking the Toyota Prius that has 51/48 and the Toyota Camry that has 22/23, there is really only a 40-50% improvement in the overall mileage.
  2. Plugin Electric, there is a question mark on plugin electric both in terms of the costs as well as overall environmental impact. For instance, users will need to install charging stations in their homes that could cost $2000 or more [source], and a cost for charging that would be on average $2.75 from empty to full [source]. I question the later cost as this is subject to change based on the season, i.e. electric costs during the summer with all the A/C and cooling would be a much higher cost than the winter. Also since a significant majority of power in the US still comes from coal [source], will the increase in the power grid from plugin electric also mean that there will be an increase in alternative renewable energy sources, or will we just burn more coal for cheap fast increases to power?
  3. Extended Range Electric, this is an interesting one as the only vehicle that falls into this bucket right now is the Chevy Volt as it does have the properties of a plugin electric; however, has a gas-powered generator that can be used to recharge the batteries if you want to go beyond the initial 35 miles that the charge will support. The benefit in my mind that extended range electric has over hybrids is that the drive is strictly an electric engine, with a gas-powered generator to only charge the vehicle vs actually driving the vehicle. Less to go wrong and simpler in design and less weight. If you go ~35 miles per charge, your still electric!

Now an interesting change in the landscape has been recent news about hyper-miling. This is to take conventional combustion engines and make them hyper efficient and couple that will smart changes to how to build vehicles to take space-age lightweight materials to reduce the overall weight of the vehicle. A recent article on inhabitat [source] has Volkswagen leading the herd with a futuristic looking concept car that touts an impressive 313 miles per gallon of diesel fuel!

There are obviously many considerations here. Some would say that this doesn’t change the current demands on fuel, that we are just as dependent on oil than we currently are today. While true, there are some differences that should be considered. First, since diesel fuel stations and distribution is already established, the widespread availability of these cars would allow existing markets to start to sell them without worrying about changing their infrastructure to provide electric charging stations. Also the difference in fuel economy is on several magnitudes larger than anything we’ve seen on hybrid, extended range or conventional vehicles. In one month, I would use between 3-4 gallons of fuel verses the 40 that I currently use on my CX-7! Second, since there is no change to the current electrical distribution system, there are no knock on effects to increase strain to the power grid.

In my view, we need to look more into hyper-miling as an alternative as it would allow for immediate adoption within the market place and provide consumers options to decide if they want to transitionally phase into more fuel efficient vehicles or electric/extended range electric vehicles. Personally I see the end in sight for hybrid vehicles as consumers should choose either full electric or hyper-mile vehicles.

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