Public Announcement

Starting May, you can still reach me on my cell phone number but it will be transferred to a voice-over-IP phone. That means you can no longer text me on that number. If you want to text me directly, you will have to text to my company phone.

Thanks.

Mapathetic?

Are you mapathetic? Do you suffer from playing the same maps over and over again on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2? If you pay $15, you will be able to get new maps next week.

For the arch rival Battlefield: Bad Company 2 players, the new maps for that game will be available for free on the same date.

In by 6, Out by 2

One of the consequences of working at a company whose average age is 54 is that everything is shifted earlier. Meetings that are called at 7 a.m. and not having any meetings after 2 p.m. People are at work really early, and then go home early. I start work at 7:30 a.m. and am considered one of the latest people who show up for work.

As for productivity at my company in particular... I think that is a product of the history and the environment. Lack of competition, presence of unions, and a sense of history give rise to a particular way of doing business that a technology worker like me finds strange.

Seattle is Risky

Check this out. Seattle is ranked as the riskiest city for cyber crimes. San Francisco is 4th on the list, and Portland, Oregon is the 10th. At least I think it is Portland, Oregon. I can't imagine Portland, Maine to be that dangerous.

Winner: Casual Games

If I had to write it out in equation form, it would look like this:


Casual Games > Wii > XBox 360 > PS3 > PC


Sadly, I'm on the lowest end of the spectrum. According to the article in Fortune Magazine, casual games are swamping motion-centric games on the Wii. We already know that the Wii is more popular than the hard core gaming consoles of XBox 360 and PS3, which in turn are far more popular than the personal computer.

The most complicated temple of power (aka the gaming PC machine) has the fewest number of players on it. To make matters worse, roughly 20% of the players on the PC play using pirated games. (estimate comes from a blog writer at Intel Corp.) That means game makers will write fewer and fewer games for the PC, and it will slowly die.

The other extreme are Farmville and Mafia Wars (made by Zynga) for Facebook and MySpace. They are cheap to build, have legions of fans, and are easy to jump in and jump out. There is no learning curve to them. I don't like those games, but I am clearly in the minority.

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While components for the PC computer keeps on getting better and better, there is no confirmed news that Microsoft or Sony are coming out with the next gaming console. Those expensive consoles cost too much to make, especially as the number of players on them dwindle. This hurts PC gamers as well, since any new games must be pegged at the technology of these platforms. Game writers will have to dumb down the games for consoles, and leaving out many of the improvements that PC's are making.

That means the incentive to buy more powerful computers is also evaporating. My older machines will play many of the titles without trouble, since the game titles are written for the older hardware of PS3 and XBox 360. Very few game titles will be written for the hexa-core, and there is no need to upgrade just to use Word.

Good bye PC games. This may be one of the last good years.

Data Breach

I'm mad at how many times a data breach has occurred on my personal data. I've lost data under the care of UCLA, Stanford, and now Bank of America. I worked at UCLA for one summer, and I attended school at Stanford. I have to say, Stanford has the best customer service in terms of protecting us from data losses. UCLA and Bank of America are poor in their response.

I'm particularly annoyed at Bank of America because they are a bank. Data breaches are going to cost *them* money.

Vampiric Energy

I am a member of the Green Solutions team at work Here is a newsletter I wrote. No protected information is included.

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Did you know that appliances plugged into the wall sockets still draw small amounts of power? While each device has a tiny power draw, when that is multiplied by the tens of thousands of employees this collective power draw has an effect on the company's electricity bill.

Southwest Airline’s “Spirit” magazine published a simple chart showing how much electricity idle devices draw. Their numbers come from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The Green Team took surveys of the business unit's energy usage and found the following:

• The most basic configuration of the work area consists of a Dell laptop, a Dell LCD, and a docking station with a power brick.

• At full strength, a LCD monitor uses 142 Watts, while the laptop uses 50 Watts.

• This basic configuration draws 6 W of power in the stand by mode.

• Small heaters underneath the desk use 700+ W of power when it is on.

The company will supply a power strip to an employee for free, allowing you to turn everything off at the end of the night with one flick. This is only helpful if you are diligent about using it. Power strips must be plugged into the wall, and not furniture outlets.

The more expensive timer power strip costs $20, and will automatically turn off vampire energy draw at night. The Green Team estimates that it will take 13 years for the return on investment for the most basic configuration (laptop, LCD, and docking station). If you have other devices plugged in—such as cell phone charges, music players, heaters—the return on investment will be much faster.

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A final word. It turns out that energy draw at home is worse than the office, because we may not have purchased energy efficient devices in the first place. Here are actual measurements of the energy usage from a real life member of the Green Team.

hot water pot ~40W
coffee pot 8W
laser printer 23W
Linksys wireless-G router 13W
Linksys cable modem 13W

Heater went kaput

It's cold in the house, and now we're receiving lots of bids for a new heater. Visions of heating efficiency, tax credit, Puget Sound Energy credit dance in my head.

We're not going to install air conditioning. We will have to rough it 5 days out of the year. Maybe sleep in our porch or downstairs with all of the windows open in late August or September when it actually gets that hot.