Marc’s Mind

Even though Thomas Paine was talking about the American Revolution when he wrote that famous passage, the phrase he used aptly describes the last week and what thousands of people in the Seattle and Pacific Northwest have been dealing with. Last Thursday, a major storm hit the region, bringing with it hurricane force winds and massive destruction causing damage and widespread power outages from Portland to Washington’s Canadian border. The day before the wind storm, we had torrential rain that softened the ground and loosened up tree roots. Trees came crashing down everywhere leaving the area looking somewhat like we had just finished a war. It was surreal as I was driving into the office morning after the winds died down, everywhere I looked there were trees that had been snapped in half or uprooted completely. There were no streetlights, no lights in anyone’s home and very few cars on the road. It was made even more disturbing by how grey everything was. Living in the area for the past 14 years, I’ve gotten used to grey skies, but this was a dirty grey that was more like a haze over everything, it was very unnatural. The governor even declared a state of emergency which wasn’t surprising considering that three quarters of the population was without power and scrambling to find warm shelter, gasoline (since without power the pumps weren’t running), fire wood, batteries, etc. since the temperature on Friday night was going to drop to below freezing. This storm came on the heels of a nasty bout the region faced a few weeks earlier with snow and ice that all but shut down the Puget Sound’s transportation system. Things are mostly back to normal again now, but you can still hear chain saws clearing away the fallen trees that knocked down power lines, smashed cars and houses and blocked roadways.

I have to give my respect and compliments to the crews working at the power companies, specifically the Puget Sound Energy crews. From the news reports I’ve heard, they had more than three quarters of their substations down and had to repair major damage just to get them back online. They had to repair the substations and feeder lines before they could work on getting anyone’s power back up. They did an amazing job and very quickly given how much damage was done and how cold the weather was here. Thanks again. I do have a major criticizm, though. I understand the motivation, but I don’t approve of it. Friday Bellevue was dark, there weren’t more than a few blocks that had power, including Overlake Hospital (who happens to be on the same substation our NOC is fed from — part of why our NOC is where it is). The hostpital’s generators performed and kept them with the power they needed until Sunday night. Saturday morning, though the Bellevue Square Mall was open for business. It really bothers me that the shopping mall got priority over other the hospital and other medical businesses that surround the hospital (and many of our neighbors). If it weren’t Christmas shopping season, chances are pretty good that a hospital would have been a slightly higer priority than a shopping mall.

I’ve been debating for the last couple of days on whether or not I wanted to post anything at all here about how it impacted me, my employees and co-workers because I didn’t want to seem petty or have any bad repercussions. The biggest problem is that the ISP business that I’ve run for more than 12 years had power reserves that failed. That caused our entire network to go down from Thursday at about 11:30pm until Sunday until about 5:30pm when we got power back — 66 hours. DSL accounts came back online by about 6pm and web sites and email were back online and fully functional by about 7:30pm. During this outage we were cut off from the world. This impacted thousands of DSL subscribers and web sites. In short, this was one of my worst nightmares come true. Since then, we as a company, and me personally have been criticized by the vocal minority. Pretty harshly, too. Its hard not to take it personally when you’ve spent the last 12+ years building a business and a reputation for being reliable and then one day having that reputation shredded by a few people who claim that we did nothing to prevent it or recover from it. They’re wrong. Of course, me posting that in any sort of public forum would just fuel the fires of the “troll’s” and make me look bad. Thats the reason for this post. This is my venue, and I control what people say and don’t say. I probably won’t authorize any comments from this post because its puprose is not for me to wage a flame war with trolls, but for me to speak my peace in a place where those I know can read it and understand what happened from my viewpoint without the contradictory opinions from those who were not involved.

As I mentioned before, we were criticized for not having adequate disaster recovery plans in place. We did, but they failed. Disaster recovery plans are those documents and guidelines that tell people what to do in case of a disaster. Sounds pretty straightforward, and are necessary for any business to have. Until the disaster strikes, however, you never know how well the system will work. Ours didn’t. Instead of pointing fingers at people and whining about all the things that wen’t wrong, though, we’re learning from it. I’m quite confident that after the changes we’re laying out are implemented, we will be able to handle an extended outage like this with little to no impact to our customers. The people harping on us for this are, for the most part, your typical garden variety usenet/forum troll. They find something that they have an opinion on, and start picking apart whomever they are “debating” (using the term loosely) with. It doesn’t matter what is said by the opposing debator, they will always find something wrong with what is said.

I’ve spoken on the phone with several customers and they are generally much more polite than they are online. I’m not sure why that is, though. To speculate, I’m guessing that the anonymity and the non-real time nature of a forum or usenet post gives them more time to think about how to craft their responses. Perhaps trying to make other people feel inferior in forums somehow makes them feel superior. I’m not a psychiatrist, nor do I claim to command some great grasp of the human psyche, but I can’t come up with anything else. It does really bother me how people can be so rude, demadning and judgemental on a forum, but once you get them on the phone or face to face they are totally different.

Case in point. One of worst of this vocal minority has sent about half a dozen messages to our sales and support team in first half of this week. He’s also posted in usenet and another forum. The first thing he did after he called and got me on the phone was give me a poorly veiled threat that he was going to just “have to take this to usenet”. It seems he didn’t want to actually talk to me about it, so I responded to him “You have me on the phone now, what exactly did you want to talk about?” Most of the conversation was one pretty sided with me talking and him being quiet. I don’t think its “answers” or “information” (using the same terms he used with me) that he was after, rather something to debate on and criticize. Even if I were to provide him with all of the details and information that he says he “needs”, what exactly would he do with it? There is absolutely nothing he could do with it. Despite having encountered this mindset countless times in the 15 years I’ve been on usenet, I still don’t understand it.

Many of these people I talk to I want to ask them a few things. For example, what were they doing to help during this disaster (and it was a disaster, and not just for us)? The answer for many of them, I suspect, would be “trying to stay warm”. For us the answer would have been a bit different. In addition to trying to stay warm, which was no easy feat for many of us, about a third of the staff was at the office (where our main NOC is) trying to figure out if there was anything else we could do to get power, which there wasn’t. In an outage this size, we couldn’t even find a house sized generator anywhere — we looked. Two of our staff members were in the eastern part of Bellevue with their chain saws helping to clear away trees from the road and off of fallen houses. Two more of our staff were repairing the large hole in the roof of one of their houses that the wind created by ripping off the shingles and then part of the roof. Personally, I was at the office waiting and thinking, as well as making and recieving a few calls trying to look for other sources of power. I had to make calls from the office since it seems that Sprint’s towers in Bothell were either down or also without power. I couldn’t make or receive calls on my cell phone at all until power came back up there on Sunday night.

As I’ve said many times through this we’ve been given some harsh criticims. Our outage times have been exaggerated (by an extra 30 hours in some cases), some even made bold claims stating they thought we went out of business. One person also said, and I quote, “I’ve been in IT for 6 years and disaster recovery isn’t that hard.” My guess is that they’ve never faced a real disaster that they were in charge of recovering from. I’ve noticed that when people get frustrated they overreact, embelish and above all love to lay blame.

Its also frustrating that when we tell people what we are doing and what we have been working on for months they think we’re shining them on. Saying that its “typical PR speak” or that we’re only now attempting to put together plans. Its very trying. I have to thank our phone support staff, too. They’ve been getting the brunt of it when people call and have remained polite and professional through some very difficult calls.

I feel terrible for all of the businesses and individuals who were without service or power, our customers or not. Walking through the grocery stores who each had to throw out tens of thousands of dollars of spoiled food makes me shake my head and wonder about how and why some people can be so self righteous and blind at times. Eight people died in this storm, most of them because they made bad decisions about how keep warm, and granted one or two of them may be up for Darwin Awards, it doesn’t change the fact that they died.

As usual, there is a lot more that I wanted to say, but the words escape me. I guess thats why I’m in IT and not an author…

marc Ego

After a very long wait, Aspyre has finally released Pirahna Bytes’ Gothic 3 in the states. Jessica and I picked it up last Saturday and have been playing it every evening since then. I would say we’re about 20% of the way through the game at this point, so I thought I would post my first impressions on it.

The bad:

First, the map and the world itself is gorgeous. Perhaps even a bit too much… The topography is a bit confusing because of the level of detail on it. We are playing at 1024×768 on high detail, so everything looks great, but things are a bit too overgrown and it makes finding things like huts, caves and things a bit more difficult than it should be.

From what I’ve read they used the Oblivion engine as a starting point for Gothic 3. In my opinion, that was a mistake. The game stutters and pauses way to often. Not enough to make the game unplayable, but it does detract from the overall enjoyment of the game. The engine they were using for Gothic 1 and 2, while a bit dated by comparison ran far better, even on slighly older hardware. We had no trouble running Gothic 1 & 2 on my older Windows box which was an Athlon XP 2400 w/1G of RAM and an GeForce 6600 in it. After reading the required specs, I upgraded my Windows machine a few months ago to be able to handle it. I upgraded to a P4 3.2GHz w/2G of RAM and a PCI-E 16 based GeForce 7600GT with 256MB of RAM on it. The game stutters and pauses a lot, whether or not its loading something from disk. I also upgraded the disk from an ATA-66 drive to a SATA-150 drive. Since I’ve got 2G of RAM in the machine, I was able to find some tweaks on the forums to bump up the caching of certain things, which helps. On Friday I ordered a Dual core P4 3.4GHz and a slightly faster 7600GT. We’ll see if that helps. The machine I’ve got, while not the fastest and most powerful system out there is faster than what the majority of people have on their desks at home. They should have tested this a bit better on slightly older hardware.

There also should have been a way to use strictly the keyboard for movement. An option to “use Gothic 2 controls” or something would have been a big help. Moving to the typical first person shooter style “WASD”/Mouse combo without an easy option to switch back was quite irritating.

My next big gripe is that they changed the way that all of the characters look too much. Perhaps it was changing the engine, perhaps it was by choice, either way its distracting. In the previous versions, the NPC’s that we interacted with and that have carried over from game to game were always somewhat distinct from the other NPC’s in the game. Not so now. Now they look like the other un-named NPC’s. Not really a big deal since its what they do that is the help, not what they look like. Part of the storyline of Gothic 3 was that it was a continuation of the previous two, and the characters have changed just a bit too much.

Speaking of characters changing. Where did his pony-tail go? That should have stayed. As silly as it looked (like a little tassle on the back of his head), it was part of the character and it should have stayed put.

The documentation is also really lacking. A tiny 58 page booklet that is mostly screen shots and graphics. Major things are missing from it, like the default keyboard map. While its true you can get to a lot of this stuff in-game, they have a section on how to move around with the default keyboard/mouse controls but leave out major things. The two biggest things that they left out were quick-bar related — Use F1 to enable or disable the quick-bar. The other big thing was using different types of arrows or quarrels. To do that you have to arm your bow or crossbow then pick the different type of ammunition you want to use from your quick-bar. It makes sense after you figure it out but its not obvious enough to leave out of the manual.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the game isn’t all bad. In fact its mostly good:

The map, while perhaps a bit over done is huge. As I said before, we’ve been playing every evening for about a week now and we’ve seen *maybe* 20% of it. That may even be an exaggeration. This is one of its greatest features. You can play for hours and discover new things in each area you go to. Three distinct “continents” each with different creatures and inhabitants make a very realistic world. Moving from one continent to the other is pretty seamless and realistic. The Hero reacts differently in each continent as well, which is another nice realistic touch. In the desert his endurance depletes faster and regenerates slower which is a nice touch. We haven’t been up to the cold north yet, but we were able to learn the “resist cold” attribute before hand, so I’m sure the climate there effects the Hero as well in some way.

Combat takes a bit of getting used to and doesn’t always work as you hope. They did do a pretty good job of making the keyboard/mouse setup handle combat but in close fights it does end up being a click-fest at times. There are some good weapons that can be found fairly early in the game so the Hero isn’t constantly dying. The fights are pretty even most of the time if you think about it and use a bit of strategy.

The main focus of Gothic has always been the quests that you do. Gothic 3 is no different. There are typically quests for each group of people you encounter. The main story line makes the quests a bit more challenging than in previous games and quite a bit more enjoyable since you have to think about how completing a quest will impact the Hero’s repuation and standing in the different communities. Basically actions have repercussions — very realistic. Its one of my favorite aspects of the game.

Trading went back to more of the style used in Gothic 1, which was much better than the style used in Gothic 2. You trade goods and gold for goods and gold. The style in Gothic 2 was less bartering and more supermarket checkout style. You can also learn skills to haggle better, though since we don’t have them yet, I’m not sure what they do yet.

The AI is much better in this version than any of the previous versions. Characters really do change their daily routines just enough for you to notice. Someone who was one place on one day doing something may not be there doing the same thing the next day. Its another one of those nice touches.

One of the coolest new things is hunting. There are herds of animals roaming the plains that you can practice hunting skills on. Heards of 10-20 bison or 5-10 deer on a plain, each of them yeilding 200 experience points, 2-4 pieces of raw meat, horns/antlers and a skin. Its a great way to get learning points by leveling up as well as cash when you trade your skins and horns. There are also lizards, snakes, hares and vultures that give 25 experience points each that are roaming around through the country. The hares even give you raw meat. Adding this gives the game a very nice bit of realism — not all creatures will attack on sight, in fact creatures like deer will run when you get too close because you spook them. Very nice touch.

I will say that it took me two evenings of playing before the game became immersive for me because of all the differences between it and its predecessors. There are bugs and its crashed a few times, the different look and feel to the game, the different voice actors all lessened my initial enjoyment of it. We’ll still be playing it to its conclusion, but its not quite as enjoyable as Gothic 2 was for us.

I’ll post again on this after we’ve played a bit on the new hardware when it gets here.

marc Reviews

Its that time of year again! No, not that time, its Halloween! That of course means pumpkin carving. After last year’s marathon session on October 30th, we decided to get an earlier start this year. Got them on last weekend’s shopping trip and planned our Sunday around carving the unsuspecting cucurbita pepos. We must be getting better at it. We started at about 5:30pm and were both finished by 8:00pm. We even took a couple of breaks.

They turned out great:

But of course seeing them with the lights on doesn’t do them justice. Lights off:

Jessica also did one more, but I don’t have the picture handy. I’ll add it later. Oh, and for the curious, mine is on the left, hers on the right.

marc Ego

That last post about Gothic II, model trains and Al Lowe’s new game I started back in May. It took me almost 5 months to get back to it. Talk about being in a long term time warp.

There have been a lot of things happening at my company, most of which I can’t talk about publicly because of trade secrets and such, but suffice to say I’ve been working even more than I normally did since early this summer. By the time I get home from work each day, I don’t really feel like spending too much time on the computer at home, so not a lot of posts here. Its good though, there are many exciting projects that I’m working on right now and with good people. The office has gone from three of us to ten of us since July. We’ve brought in racks of new servers for these projects and will be launching new services hopefully in November. Once we launch some of them, I’ll be able to talk a bit more about them.

Jessica and I have also been trying to start a family. The timing may seem a bit strange, but after so many years of saying that “its not time yet”, we find ourselves in our mid-30’s. In order to have a family, though, we need to go through IVF. Jessica talks more about it on her blog. We started in April and have had two unsuccessful attempts. We’ll probably start our third attempt in January. We’re trying very rapidly to keep her from going on and off of her MS medication since the on-again-off-again could be very bad for her and we don’t want her to have another exacerbation.

marc Ego

Talk about out of character for me. A few weeks ago at E3, Al Lowe, one of the greatest video game makers of all time announced that he has created a new company called iBase Entertainment and was creating a new game called Sam Suede in Undercover Exposure. I’ve been a big fan of Al’s since the Leisure Suit Larry 1 days that I played with stunning 16-Color EGA graphics back in the late 80’s. I met Al about a year ago and had him autograph my copy of the Larry I, II, & II collection.

Of course the good picture of Al and I shaking hands was lost, so this one will have to do. Hopefully Al won’t mind me putting this picture up. We met because I knew he was an avid model railroad hobbyist. I’d been carting around the model trains I got for Christmas from Uncle David when I was 5 or 6, and I thought Al would like them or be able to use them. I believe Al gave them to a children’s hospital, which is great.

At any rate, shortly after Jessica and I met, we started playing games like Kings Quest (which Al also had a hand in creating) and Liesure Suite Larry together. Many many hours were spent on those games and we really had a good time playing them.

So after hearing the announcement, I had to play a game. Wasn’t an option, I had to do it. I wanted to play another adventure game that we could play together. Nothing like Doom 3 or Half-Life 2, both of which I’ve played, but not extensively. I played Castle Wolfenstein and both of the original Doom games, but haven’t really played much in the last 10 years or so. After Sierra started changing their company around they just didn’t produce many games that appealed to me.

Then we stumbled on Gothic II. Its a couple years old, but was re-released in December of last year. We’ve pretty much played it every night for more than a month. It is a very good game and reminds me a lot of the King’s Quest games, but more adult oriented. There is a lot of exploring, quests that you pick up from other characters in the game that you complete for experience points or gold, skills to learn and puzzles to solve. We’ve really been enjoying it. Oh, the adult parts consist of some drug use (swampweed) and our character has sex in a brothell. Of course, this being a German game, the original was uncensored. Since Atari distributed it in the US, they censored it for some reason. I guess we American’s can’t handle seeing nude computer generated women after we finish slaughtering Orc’s, wolve’s, giant rats and other human characters in the game. I mean the line has to be drawn somewhere.

Of course, I started this entry about two months ago. Since then Gothic III has been announced and I’m sure there will be another time warp at the end of November when its released in the US.

marc Uncategorized