Category: Commentary

Crucible Design released The Project Sourcebook: Web Edition yesterday. I wanted to do something with it and it was better to be out there than just sitting on our hard disks. People can download the book from http://www.crucibledesign.com/
You can use it in any conspiracy-type game and there’s heaps of good stuff in there but it’s a shame that we couldn’t get it properly published. i’d have loved to but not one of the others was interested in doing that bit.

It doesn’t include the cover, internal maps or even the “Project War” statistics that I’d written. It just includes the text which, for free, is fair enough. Lesley thinks that it will create more work. I don’t mind work – I’ve done plenty before and I’ll do plenty again – I dislike people who break promises.

I feel let down by the rest of the group. I expected at least one of them to show a little bit of enthusiasm and maybe argue the point but everyone just went with the flow. Why rock the boat.

The interesting thing will be Q-CON and afterwards. Will Crucible have a trade stand? Will I turn up at all? Do we continue with CrucibleDesign.com or just let it lapse?

You could argue that it’s all my fault that it’s gone pear-shaped. I stopped doing work and things went downhill. I berated one guy for consistently breaking promises and now, despite knowing him since I was 11 years old, we’re still not talking. I’m probably impatient in my old age but I got sick of the lies and nonsense. At least some people were honest about their level of commitment and you can only respect them for it. Why lie about something like this?

Thinking about CrucibleDesign tires me out these days. Years and years of emotional investment and now, it’s worth nothing.

I haven’t gamed in months and I just want to have some escape – just something to think about other than work and computers. I’m sitting here now and know that when I go home I have to write a 2 hour course for the people I’m teaching tomorrow night. It’ll take 2-4 hours to write and then two hours to teach tomorrow night. When I’m not working on that I’m thinking about my training course in Mac OS X and also the effort I’m putting into setting up my own network-and-Mac-based training and consultancy company. On top of that I’ll be in work on Saturday doing some unpaid overtime.

I’m so tired of it all. I’m especially tired of not having good news and great cheer for my livejournal. It’s just depressing. After tomorrow night is done and dusted I’ll be in a better mood. You’ll see.

But it’s time to go home now. Time to cook the dinner and then get stuck into writing the materials for tomorrow.

i’ve fallen down.
or was i pushed
i can’t get up

Crucible Design released the Projects Sourcebook for free today. It’s not properly laid out and it’s not grammar- or spell-checked. But it is finished insofar as no-one will be doing any further work to it. Seems also that the other books I’d planned will be still born as well: HorrorShow, Networking for Beginners, The Powers That Be. The book contains some of Colin’s best stuff in my opinion – some of his stuff that really inspired me.

http://www.crucibledesign.com/

I’ve already nabbed Airtight and Qabal over to LateGaming and I’ll be working on them alone. I’m tired of relying on people. Some people never deliver when they promise and some people are just too busy these days to write anything. I need to write so I’ll continue. Seems that it was up to me all along.

I’ve not done near enough writing as it is recently and that’s something I’ll have to remedy.

Two inches of snow last night. Also went on a tour of the hospital and saw the delivery rooms and stuff. Mad to think that in about 2.5 weeks I’ll be in there panicking. And not long after a proud daddy.

Been vegging today. Trying to get Crucible doing something so I suggested that I fix up the Project Sourcebook and just stick it on the web. It’s currently being wasted where it is and no-one is going to bother their ass doing anything about it since I backed down.

So, onto other projects. Wrote heaps more on my training course. Even wrote some stuff for one of my other books. I REALLY should write stuff for my teaching on Wednesday but I’m not in the mood.

I usually like Fridays but today is somewhat of an exception. I was woken up in the middle of the night by the wind whistling around the house – it was so loud I thought we’d lose the roof. Then getting up – I never enjoy that. Then coming into work in the wind and rain hearing weather warnings from the Met Office about high winds gusting up to 70 mph.

Now I’m sat in the office and I’m meant to be looking at VLAN Tagging on one of our devices and, of course, I’m not that interested in looking at that. I want to look at other stuff. My feet are cold too – that annoys me most of all. Thank god for iTunes and my Mac. I’d be insane if I had to cope with Windows alone. It’s just so slow at some simple tasks.

And I’m hungry as well. There was such a queue at the coffee machine that I skipped my morning coffeechoc thing (1 part expresso, 1 part hot chocolate) and that’s put me a little more grumpy than I’d usually expect. As a result I’m looking forward to lunchtime – whatever terrors that may hold.

I’ve been working on testing for this SNMP vulnerability on heaps of kit. There’s a lot of work in it. Whoosh.

I’m going over to England on Sunday night for two nights. It’s going to be the first time I’ve met some of the team.

What some people don’t realise is that barely 50% of teaching is the notes you give out. If that was the case then all you would need to do would be to hand out notes at the start of the year and then sit and read a book for the remainder.

Teaching, and therefore training, is about helping people understand what you talk about, helping them relax and learn. Running a training course…is just the same.

Gah, must sleep. But I’m watching Ultraviolet…

It’s a Monday and frankly I didn’t expect much more out of a Monday.

There’s a guy in the Lab who essentially misrepresented some test results in order to make himself look like a “go getter” and a “guy who gets things done”. I was angry and, to be honest, I should have been angrier. Essentially he took 4 month old results and used them as proof that my group had been doing nothing over the last four months when, in fact, we’d spent quite a lot of time working on the problem and actually had solved 99% of their queries by the time this was escalated to the first level never mind the current escalation to the TOP of the Lab.

Of course, if he thinks he can take credit for work I’ve done then he’s got another thing coming. I can be a mean sonofabitch. Grrrrr.

Have you read the news today?

I’m teenager bored.

Teenager bored is when you want to do something but you don’t know what it is. You have all these things you might have to do. All of these things you really should do.

Of course you don’t WANT to do them. Now…I’m not talking about the absolute essentials here – you know – if Lesley shouts I’m out of my seat in a microsecond. But…I made dinner and …well… I’m leaving the dishes. I was in work for five hours this morning and I HATE being in work on a Saturday. I don’t want to be like the typical Dad who, driven by a need to provide, spends more time in work after he has a child. That’s not who I want to be.

I will not be that person.

I have a vision of Jar-Jar wearing a trenchcoat and sporting a mohawk and a quick-release pistol. Scary.

I taught my first web site management course last night and it was not bad. I’ve managed to figger out the level of understanding of the subject pretty much now which means I can get stuck into actually teaching them stuff. For last night I tried to start the gentle process of weaning them off FrontPage and into a little bit of HTML coding – certainly to make them unafraid of the text itself. A lot of the class seem a little disaffected by being dumped by their first lecturer after two weeks but I’ll sort that out with a bit of irreverent and infectious humour. Getting them to laugh is the first step in getting them to relax and when relaxed they’ll learn better. The second class, my small Computer Architecture class, I know a lot better and we tell a lot of jokes. I expect people to speak out but then I’ve known some of them for over a year now!

Made a conscious decision not to move today. Seats I mean. There’s an opportunity to move back into the Lab and there’s a lot of things going for that but I think it’s better to stay where I am. Gordon is playing a mix of music in the background and sometimes people pop over for a chat which is nice and would be a lot more difficult in the Lab. We certainly wouldn’t be able to play music which would suck. So I’ll stay out.

The world would be okay if we could just ditch all of the people. Some people don’t listen and some of those who seem to be listening are just waiting for their turn to speak. I’m a little pissed because a bloke who I gave heaps of network roadmap information to has just come back and told my boss that I haven’t supplied him with information. The fact that I not only got a receipt from him for the data but also an email of thanks for it makes it all a farce.

I applied for that damn job last night. It’s a senior managerial post in charge of a Support Team, a Development Team and an Information Team. The pay probably won’t be an increase but it’ll be more stable certainly and also would be nice to get the “rank” if not the “benefits”. I really feel like I’ve been held back by the outsourcing – after all I went from being a team leader to being one person in a team – sure the team is higher profile – but at the end of the day I’m working way above my JCI (Job Complexity Index) and the reason my JCI hasn’t been increased is because of the current climate – no pay rises or promotions. And that sux. And that’s why I want a change. It’s not the pay (it’s always the pay) but rather the fact that I’ve missed the promotions while others in other parts of the business are doing other things. I’m pissed about that.

Whoosh. We got a new front door. It’s a door. Okay. It’s a nice door and it does make the house feel a little warmer which is always a benefit. And we took delivery of about a zillion eco-friendly disposable nappies. Cool. Ahem.

Still waiting on my copy of Wipeout!