Star Trek Online: A Brief Beta Impression

I pre-ordered Star Trek Online as it is one MMO that I have been awaiting for a long time.  The open beta has started a few days ago and aside from some technical issue which I’ve seen in just about every beta I have ever played (server downtime, a random crash here and there, some goofy animations that are clearly not quite done yet), the game is great.

The ground combat is nothing to write home about, but the feeling of being with an away team (red-shirts and all) is pretty cool.  You get to zap bad guys with phasers and pulse rifles, go hand to hand and coordinate fire with other team members.  Overall, a pretty decent experience based on the source material’s rather blase ground combat.

The space combat is where the game really shines.  You have to consider your shield, the placement of your weapon arrays, reload time and  the shielding of the enemy vessel.  I have found that the best way to beat someone is to pound on one section of their shields and then hit them with a torpedo.

The combat looks like Trek, sounds like Trek and feels like Trek.  Overall, a really good job there.

The interface is a little confusing, but you do get used to it pretty quick and it is just a beta, so I cannot really complain.

You can also customize your ship’s look and color scheme, which is pretty neat, although not really that important in my opinion as I personally want my ship to look like a Federation vessel.

The uniform customization is pretty neat as you get a big variety of styles and colors to pick from.  So, if you want to walk around in formal wear all the time, you can.

I am really hyped for the release of this game, when we will hopefully have a lot more servers up so the server issues that have kept me from playing the game more get resolved.

Mockups: A Guide to Visual Design

A picture is worth 1000 words.  We have all heard this expression before and there is a lot of truth to that expression.

When going through the initial phases of any project, vision is important.  In fact, I believe that vision is the most important part of all projects.  If you know what it is that you are trying to make, you know when you get there.  If your vision is blurred, you can never be sure that you have achieved what you set out to do.

I decided to refer to the goal of a project as vision since words are such abstract things.  You might think that words are fairly absolute things, but think about their usage.  Inflection, context and culture can warp and change the meaning of a given word to the point where the root is lost and its meaning is totally changed.  However, pictures are more absolute.

At this point you might be thinking that I have lost my mind.  You might think that I am suggesting that pictures should replace words or something along those lines.  That is not the case.  However, pictures should be present to re-enforce and clarify words.

What do I mean specifically?  Well, let’s say I am describing something to you.  It is an object, has tufts of cotton coming out of the top, a floral pattern over most of its surface, is covered in a plastic wrap for protection and can only be used a given number of times before it should be discarded.

Based on that description you might thing that I am talking about some sort of medical scrubs or pillow for senior citizens.  However, I am referring to the facial tissue box on my desk.  In this example, I could have just said facial tissue box, however, what about new ideas, processes or products.

How does one describe a MacBook Air in words.  Well, it is doable, but if you have ever seen the whitepaper for a complex product, you know that it takes a lot of words and most whitepapers contain diagrams to aid comprehension.

Wireframes, mockups and pre-visualizations all help in getting concepts across to your customers.  And from a business standpoint, if you can get signoff on pictures that show the product, you at least have a vague idea of what the customer wants.  Otherwise, you risk scope-creep and loss of money on every project.

Holiday Travel: A Postmortem

The holidays have come and gone and so have I.  Travel was again in the cards for me this year and it was an unpleasant experience.

The first clue that I had that this was not going to be a good travel season came on my first day of travel.  I bought a ticket online like most people do these days.  The ticket was a US Airways flight.  I had never flown US Airways, but it also mentioned something about United Airlines, so I assumed they were some sort of United Airlines subsidiary.

The day of the flight comes and I go to the area near the gate from which the flight is supposed to take off.  It is a United Airlines check-in area.  I ask one of the agents in the area if this is where I am supposed to check in and am told that I need to go to the US Airways check-in area.  OK, I have never flown US Airways before, no problem, I’ll just walk down to the US Airways area.  The US Airways area is 30 gates down (about a 20 minute walk in the spacious DFW terminal).

I then queue in line at US Airways and after a long wait (expected due to holiday traffic), I am told that I am actually on a United Airlines flight, so I need to make the walk back to the United Airlines area.  After rushing back to the United Airlines area and checking in as quickly as possible I barely make it to the gate as boarding is happening.

My issue with the whole episode is the person who told me that I was to check in at US Airways.  I did not see them when I came back, but word to the wise, US Airways flights operated by United Airlines are simply United Airlines flights, just forget that US Airways is even mentioned.

On my way back to Dallas, I sat in abject anxiety waiting to hear that my flight would be cancelled.  It turned out that my flight was not canceled, not late, but in fact early.  However, the fact that up until 30 minutes before takeoff, they were not sure if it was going to be ready or not.

So, moral of the story, don’t fly, it sucks and apparently the fine folks at all the airlines barely know what they are doing after being in business for almost 100 years.

Shameless Plug: JustHost.com

Now, I am not one to shamelessly plug stuff.  I generally dislike even endorsing products or services, but I have recently (about 1 month ago) purchased hosting from JustHost.com and have been impressed with the service they offer.

First off, they are dirt cheap.  I pay less than 5 dollars a month and I don’t have to watch the bandwidth or size as they offer unlimited of both.  They do have a fair usage policy, so all you Fortune 500 companies, steer clear. However, for those of you who want to set up a personal web site or a small business site, it works pretty well.

It is a standard Linux/PHP/MySql package, with all of the bells and whistles you expect, but I was expecting a much more bumpy ride than what I got.

On top of this, they give you a free lifetime domain with purchase, so you don’t have to worry about the additional cost of that.

All in all, I would give them an A+ and would put them even with or just about GoDaddy due to the price advantage.

Web Presence

We all want to be successful in life and for most of us, that means making a lot of money.  But how does one make a lot of money.  Traditionally you could get a trade and make a good or even great living plying that trade.  Doctors, lawyers, engineers; these used to be the professions of choice for “successful” people.  However, with the rising cost of healthcare, the increasing pool of law school students and the globalization of technology, these professions are falling by the wayside for really making bank.

It is in content and presence that the money really lies.  You may have a negative opinion of someone like a Paris Hilton, however, you cannot argue that she does have a line of clothing and even a line of fragrances, all of which make her large amounts of money.  Is she a bad person?  That’s not for any of us to say.  Is she talented?  In my opinion, no, but that is just my personal opinion.  Did she figure out a way to make a lot of money? Definitely.

So what about the rest of us? Most people do not have a famous last name and the ability to get our picture in the paper, so we have to go about things in a different way.

People have personal passions, things that interest them for no logical reason.  I happen to like football and fast cars.  Do I drive fast? Not really, but I still dream of having some supercar one day and keep up with information about new vehicles.  Do I think that I will be playing in the NFL? No, although I have the body of a Greek god (you know Dionysus, who has put on a few pounds over the years), my odds of being the next QB for the Cowboys are about on par with me sprouting wings and flying away.

You might ask, so what, I like some stuff, how do I make money off of it.  Well, you don’t own that thing that you like, so you cannot make money off of it directly.  However, repositories of knowledge are highly prized.  For example, the TWiT network of programs technically does not create any more content than you friends sitting in your living room.  However, they research the topics they talk about and are generally very accurate in what they say.  People value the presentation of the content and the friendly banter that the shows have, so some people donate and some people buy hats and T-shirts, and the people working on those shows get a little money from it.

Do they make enough to live on? Well, I don’t know, but I would think not.  However, they get some monetary reward for doing something they enjoy, which is more than most people can say. So, if you like knitting, make a website about knitting, and maybe sell some of your knitting on there for people who are interested.  Will it make you rich?  Probably not, but it is far more likely to than just working your 9-5.

Corporate Posturing

In our modern world, posturing has become more prevalent than actual deals.  We posture to get the attention of customers.  We posture to get sales.  We posture to keep customers.

My question is: Why do we focus so much on perceptions and so little on product quality and the reality of the work involved to bring a good product to market?

I am a software developer and simply put good software is hard to write.  It isn’t that getting it to work is hard, if it were then I should be doing something else.  The difficulty comes in accounting for all the possible workflows and for all the small details that can derail things.

For example, you have a field that a user can type in a money amount in.  You have to be able to handle dozens of input formats (with commas, without, with the symbol for the currency, without and so on), you then have to be able to tell the user in a way that does not frustrate them if they typed in something that you can’t handle (like all letters).  That can take a while to go through and account for.

Now take that example and multiply the work by the number of fine interaction points that exist in your product and you have the time it would take to code the product.  This is of course an oversimplification, but the concept applies in general production of products as well.  The same can be said of the little change tray in cars.  It should be big enough for most coins in the world, small enough to not inconvenience the user,  sturdy enough to last as long as the car, aesthetic enough to not be an eyesore and the list goes on and on.

The reality is that most product do not go through all of this to be made and that is why we have recalls on cars due to gas pedals that can jam, software patches (now common even among console video games and mobile phone software) and free straps for Wii motes after some people put theirs through their big screen TVs.

What causes this rush and carelessness on the part of gigantic companies?  The market of course.  We want the fancy new sprocket that will make our life better and we want it yesterday.  Oh, and if it could possible cost us no money, that would be swell.  So, what we end up with is lots of crappy products that we are never happy with because they were not allowed to bake long enough.

I think that as a society, we need to learn patience.  That new phone that will enrich your life can probably stand to be in development for another year, so when it comes out, it is twice as sturdy and three times as optimized.  That new car should probably not go into production within 3 years of its concept phase or we might end up with some people wrapped around trees (and not in the tree-hugger sense).

Medical studies have shown that people with a lower stress level live longer, so why don’t we all take a step back and just slow down when it comes to personal products, we will probably get higher quality stuff that we can enjoy for a longer period of time.

Endgame

The term endgame gets thrown around a lot lately.  Whether it be in politics, the military, personal relationships, sports, business deals, or even just in a simple task, the term endgame seems to come up a lot.  However, most people do not know what the term means and what it’s lexicological meanings are.

Endgame generally refers to a stage in the game of chess, after most of the pieces have been removed from the board and only a few remain.  When used in this sense, the term also carries connotations of psychological strength and the ability to maintain composure under pressure.

The terms is also thrown around in terms of politics and war in a very similar sense.  Lately I have even heard President Obama use it to refer to the war in Afghanistan and the next 2 years.  In this sense, the connotations are more important than the definition.

How does America disentangle itself from a fairly big mess that it has gotten itself into in the middle east?

Flat out leaving has stopped being an option long ago.

Protecting the Afghan and Iraqi people indefinitely is also out of the question as the cost would cripple our economy.

So, the endgame is inevitable.  This is a win or lose strategy, but you can wipe out your enemy, but still lose.  What a lot of people are missing and this is a hard concept to get a grasp on is that this is not a matter of us against them.  We barely understand who them is, and as shown by the shooting at Fort Hood last month, one of us can easily become one of them.

What can you do to have a good endgame.  First, measure your available resources.  Even the best chess player can lose a game that they should have won if they get careless at the end.  In the same way, you can win campaign after campaign and then get bogged down in insurgencies and lose the war due to inability to bring your overwhelming forces to bear on the enemy.

Second, in order to have a good endgame, you have to realize that the game needs to end.  With that in mind, you need to have a plan of how you will end it.  The emphasis there is that you will end the game and not that the game will end with you as a player.  Once you have come to accept that as your reality, you will be able to plan and act on your plan.

Finally, stick to your plan.  This does not mean that if it is not working, you should just keep going, but rather that you should not change things that are working simply for the sake of change. If a strategy is working, keep at it, you might just be on to something.

You might be asking yourself what in the heck it is that I am trying to get at here.  Well, simply put, endgames are a fact of life.  We all have to experience them and we should all be prepared to do so in a manner that benefits us and which does not stress or hurt us.  When looking at something, think of how the process will end, because things end, all things end.