WIZ WAR ETA 2 YEARS!

BEST NEWS EVER:

Tom Jolly posted some great news for the future of Wiz-War, a game I dearly love. Briefly, he's had some sort of contract with Chessex (the dice manufacturer) for them to produce the game. As I understand it, they've held this contract for more than eight years- and still have not produced the eighth edition. He's finally in a position to cancel this contract, so the Wiz-War property is going to be snatched up by a currently-nameless company which is probably Fantasy Flight Games.

This means that the game will be back in print after a decade, the property will be in the hands of a game company that has a long-established relationship with the designer, and that it will be dripping with theme.

Huzzah!

Job

I start work at NOCCA this Monday!

Computer support at this point, but who knows if it'll turn into the opportunity to teach the didj or game design?

Mystery and engimas

For those of you in the know, my Saturday went extremely well.

Save the users

It's a hack that works. I woke up this morning with a rant, ready to blog.

Let's say you work as a professional typist. I don't mean in the 1950s-secretary sense of the word, but I mean a person who types for a living. One who types hundreds of words per minute, knows dozens of layout programs, eats word processor manuals for lunch, and can hand-tune the margins on a vintage IBM Selectric... not just someone who knows the difference between a hyphen, an emdash and an endash.

Now let's say that you, the professional typist, get a call from someone who wants to pay you to type up a research paper as per your regular freelance rates. This person is your client, or possibly just a customer.

Now let's say that you, the professional typist, work for a large organization that pays you for your capacity to type things. One of your coworkers in a different department sends a project your way- let's say the transcription of a presentation given at a conference. Unless money changes place, this person is not your customer, not your client. Yall are just coworkers.

Sometime in the eighties, corporate flacks, inundated with anti-drug messages, decided that they didn't like the connotation of "user" when applied to their employees, and started the disturbing trend of referring to "customers" rather than "users."

I can appreciate wanting IT monkeys to provide better customer service to users, but that does not make customers out of your users! There's a whole different relationship implied between a customer and a provider that is wholly inappropriate for the workplace.

The customer is always right, but the user doesn't know what they need. I don't mean that people need up-selling, but that quite literally a user doesn't — and shouldn't — know what they need to use their computers and systems. It's not their role and not their job to know that the one server connects to the other server via this-and-such encryption protocol because it's regulated by the Fed's TLA branch. They simply need to use their tools they need to do their job.

It's just plain wrong. It's the wrong word. Drives me crazy. Whenever I hear someone in a Corporate IT position say, "customer," I have to ask, "Do you mean the end-user?" Some IT positions are customer-facing, and some aren't. The person one supports is not unnecessarily one's customer.



Most importantly, I dreamt this rant- so the blog-a-day-slash-NaNoWriMo hack is working.

Just got paid today

...got me a pocket full of change.

I haven't had access enough to post to Blogger lately, for which I apologize. I've got some links and articles shared over in the sidebar.

For my RSS friends, please click on an ad or two, okay? If not, that's okay. You can still read my shared Google Reader items.

Speaking of ads, I've gotten something like less than forty bucks credit over at FunAgain, about four bucks at Amazon, and less than fifteen from Google Adsense. Hooray! You too can be famous on the internets and get paid for it... eventually, and in small amounts.

T minus two hours

Soon, I leave to work. Gotta run some errands first, and after three months full of free time, I really don't like having to adjust my schedule based on external factors. Times like this make we wonder how everyone else takes care of errands outside of nine to five, and why more "normal" service providers don't have later hours. Imagine a mechanic that stayed open until midnight!

My keys are lighter

Yesterday, I relinquished more than half of the mass of my keychain to my former job. No, I didn't weigh it. Yes, I wanted to.

I no longer have a key to the Xilinx Austin office, their server room, or the admin's lockbox; I also don't have a nifty VPN token (handy for random numbers if you forget your dice), either. Now I only have house, car, mailbox, and the ring itself. This is all metaphor that I don't have to strain or stretch to make it fit. I've shed responsibility, burdens, and restraints- the world is my oyster and I can do anything.

What's on your keyring? What do you need? What can you get rid of?

The paradox of choice

If you had three months with no vocational obligations, would you take the opportunity to pursue your dreams? How would you change your life if you find yourself no longer tied to your job?

Update your resume today

The absolute worst time to update your resume is when you need to; you really should look at it every three months, at least to make sure your contact info is right. You never know when a better opportunity will come along, or if you'll find yourself in a position of need.

When did you last update yours? Don't put it off any longer.

Shop New Orleans

I wish I would have found out about this earlier in the holiday season, but my mom just sent me a site that collects a bunch of New Orleans local businesses with an online presence. The basic idea is to help rebuild the city by helping revive the economy with an infusion of out-of-state cash that not donated or loaned, but actually going straight to the heart of the mom-and-pop places that make up the soul of the city.

A few suggestions from the list:

• The Times-Picayune's store has a wealth of visual and newsworthy delights: Snow (really!) in 2004, the pope's visit, Katrina, Katrina, Katrina.
  
• Scriptura, a great shop for readers and writers- paper, ink, and more. Classy but not pretentious.
  
• The Michalopoulos gallery, a local artist with a distinct style of painting architecture- one day I'll own one of his actual paintings.
• Perlis, the men's clothing line with crawfish-embroidered polos.
• Emeril, Paul Prudhomme, and Cafe du Monde all have an online presence.
  

If you can't visit New Orleans, try the next best thing.

Inspiration

Steve Pavlina provides some compelling reasons for remaining unemployed- Mom, pretend I said "freelance."

We're seeing more and more strange and wonderful situations due to the non-physicality of the net- Successful virtual businesses in Second Life; the Long Tail for retail; individual people forming communities based on ideas and interests rather than geophysical space.

Everyone else is doing it, why can't I?

Grammarian Gripes

A misplaced bit of punctuation or spelling is like a bit of sand in my eye; a constant irritant that needs removal. I readily admit that I'm not perfect, though I do catch a lot of mistakes in other people's writing.

From A.Word.A.Day comes a Canadian story about how a single comma could cost a cable company one million dollars Canadian.

Yikes. Time to proofread.