Sunday night I ended up working late. Like really, really late. I finally got to bed around 2:30am.
But, I was at a loss how to account for the time. I’m a salaried employee. That means that whether I work 40 hours a week or 80 hours a week, I get paid the same. There are obvious benefits to being salaried. Typically, salaried positions pay better. Okay, not if you are making consultant rates, but in a typical IT organization, the higher up the food chain you are, the more likely you are salary.
The biggest benefit is that you get paid by the day, not by the hour. That means if you arrive at work and 30 minutes after sitting down, you have a family emergency, and you’re gone the rest of the day, the company has to pay you for the entire day.
That rarely happens. What more often happens is you put in an 8 or 10 hour day and then something blows up after hours and you have to work on that until it’s fixed. And if you have a job like mine, where I’m on call 24×7, if something breaks on a Sunday, you fix it on a Sunday.
This particular issue hit about 11:30AM. Agents reported issues with their phone systems. My family typically goes to church at 1:00pm on Sundays. My lovely wife is the music director. She was feeling a little under the weather and asked me if I would lead the music. It’s not hard, right? I mean, you wave your hand up and down and the congregation follows the organ player anyway.
When my phone rang at 11:30, I had to inform her that I would not be available to wave my hand up and down. The kids and I went to church. They took seats in the chapel, I sat in my car with a phone in my ear. Church is three hours long. The first hour is in the chapel with the entire congregation. The second hour is Sunday School, and the third hour, the youth break up into groups divided by age and gender. My responsibility is to teach the 12-13 year old boys. They are called Deacons in the Mormon church.
My phone call lasted all through the first hour. It lasted all through the 2nd hour. As the third hour came around, I told the folks on the conference bridge,
Yeah, I’m going to be teaching a class. I’ll keep on the bridge, but I won’t be saying anything.
I kept the ear piece in and taught my lesson on faith to a room full of pre-teen boys. It went great. I love teaching. I wish I didn’t have to do it with a phone stuck to my ear. Finally, about 5:30pm, my team reported they had not seen the issue for the past hour. The client was still working on it, but my agents were fine. I dropped off the bridge.
Now, when we have an outage, I have an entire team that helps manage it. I kind of run it, but there are plenty of people who are actively engaged. One team sends out “Outage Notifications.” Emails describing the issue and the current status. At 5:30 they sent the final notification saying the issue was resolved.
It wasn’t. It was still appearing on the backend. We just couldn’t see it on our production floor. It got worse around 9:00pm. The client called me and I, along with one of my overnight supervisors joined the call. But, my agents still weren’t seeing an issue. However, the client was seeing it. So, we sat on their bridge and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, at 2:30am, the client announced that they had successfully replicated the issue in their offices. That meant they no longer needed us on the line.
As we dropped from the call, I considered my options. I’d just spent an extra five and a half hours on a call on a Sunday night. I was going to miss my 7:30AM Monday meeting. (Because: sleep.) But, because we hadn’t seen the issue in our production facility, there was no outage call on my side. There were no emails announcing that we were still working on it. In other words, I was getting no credit for the time I worked.
If a tree fell in the forest and all that.
Now, maybe I shouldn’t care. Maybe it should be enough that we helped the client isolate an issue and that means that customers have a better experience. Maybe. But, I still somehow felt slightly cheated. I lost most of my Sunday to an outage call. My company doesn’t practice comp time, so I wasn’t getting those hours back. My only compensation in those situations was the office cred I got for working crazy, stupid hours. But, who do I tell?
I finally decided on a plan just before I went to bed. There was a chance the problem might show up the next day. So, I decided it was important to warn everyone that we might have an issue first thing in the morning. I wrote a brief email explaining the problem and reported that we had worked on it and work was continuing. I sent it to all the people who might be interested. Conveniently that was also all the people who know of my work schedule.
Yup, they all had an email waiting in their inbox Monday morning. And as the opened, it, right there at the top was the time stamp: SENT AT 2:30AM.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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You’re expected to make 100 calls per day.
Why?
Because if you don’t make at least 100 outbound calls you don’t get paid.
Okay. . .but, why?
What does your company do? I work for a call center. I’m in IT. My job is to make sure the computers stay running. But, that’s not what my company does. My company doesn’t even answer phone calls. Sure, that’s a metric, but it’s not a result. We measure our success by satisfied customers. If I took 50 calls but everyone was mad when I got done, is that preferable taking 40 calls, but everyone is pleased when they hang up with me?
I hope you said no.
As managers we often confuse metrics with results.
I have a good friend who drives about 2500 miles per week. He’s a blood courier. He literally picks up blood from one location and drives it to another location. I call him a blood-runner. But, you can just say he “deals in blood.” The point is my friend spends a lot of time in his car. It’s an easy to measure metric. He can tell you how many miles he drove on a particular day. He can tell you how many hours he spent in his car that day. (He probably would prefer you not do the math to figure out the miles per hour.)
But, my friend’s job is not to drive a certain number of miles per week. His job isn’t to spend a certain number of hours on on the road. His job is literally to get lifesaving blood to the places that need it most. Suppose he was supposed to drive from Salt Lake City to Boise, ID. Google maps thinks it is 345 miles and will take 5 hours and 1 minute. Now, suppose he picked up the blood in SLC, drove North for exactly 5 hours and then turned around and came back?
Did he do his job? Of course not. He spent the time, he drove the miles (minus the last one) but he didn’t get the blood to where it needed to go.
The key to breaking out of the “manage by metric” mold is to figure out what it is you do and what it is that your team members do. In project management it’s called figuring out “what does success look like?”
Once you figure out what it is that you and your team does, then you can think about pertinent metrics. Chances are they aren’t what you think.
I worked for a manager one time who had a tough time figuring this out. We were a project manager team. We worked with people all across the company running projects. We even had team members in other parts of the world. Project Managers were the glue that held the virtual teams together. We literally could be on the phone at any time of the night or day.
My manager picked “time logged into the phone system” as one of his key metrics. And not total time on the phone, but where you physically logged into the phone between the hours of 7:30 and 2:30. Oh, and you could only log into the phone from your desk phone.
No amount of discussion could convince him that phone time was not a metric that was a key indicator of our success. In fact, we had one team members who logged into his phone and then headed up to the 7th floor to visit with his buddies to discuss their March Madness bracket. But, he got good reviews because he logged into the phone at 7:30am.
I have friends in sales. Imagine you run an outbound sales team. Their job is to make 100 calls per day. You’ve done the math and you know that if they make 100 calls they will get 30 people willing to listen to a sales presentation. Out of those 30, you’ll get 4 sales. It’s just basic numbers and it all starts with that century mark of calls.
Now, consider Mark. You notice that Mark is only making 60 calls per day. You’re about ready to fire him, but you decide to coach him and see if he can boost his numbers to the acceptable level.
Mark, thanks for stopping by. I’ll get right to the point. Your call numbers are way down. If we can’t get them back in the acceptable range I’m going to have to let you go.
Why?
Because, when I hired you I explained that the minimum acceptable effort was 100 calls per day.
No, I mean, why 100?
We’ve been over this. One hundred, thirty and four. Our entire business model is based on volume and it starts with contacts.
Have you looked at my close numbers?
No, that’s Paul’s department.
Twelve.
Twelve what?
My calls lead to 12 sales per day.
That’s not the point.
I thought you just said that was the point. How I work my call sheets is leading to three times the results of anyone else here.
That may be, but how can I hold everyone else to 100 calls if I let you skate with 60% of that? What are the other guys on the team going to say?
Who cares? Tell them to take a little more time to get to know the contact like I do and maybe they’ll get a better conversion rate.
Okay, fine. Let’s go your route. You’re saying that with just 60 calls you can get three times the rate the other guys are getting with 100 calls, right?
Exactly!
Okay, what I’m hearing is that if you actually put in the effort of making 100 calls which is in your employment contract you would actually make 20 sales per day. So, your sluffing off and only putting in 60% effort is costing the company 8 lost sales per day.
You know what happened, of course. Mark went back to making 100 calls per day and getting 4 sales.
Manage to the results, not the metric.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I’m sorry, Mr. Bliss, all we have left is a suite. I hope that will be okay.
The front desk clerk had the practiced smile that is designed to say, “Imma hook you up.”
Sure, that will be great.
I didn’t really care. I wasn’t upset or mad. I honestly just didn’t care. We were in another city for another week’s worth of meeting. I would be arriving on the site between 7:30 and 8:00am. We’d go to dinner after and I’d probably be back in the room around 10:00pm. A few emails, an hour or so of mindless TV and I’d go to sleep to start the whole thing over again.
Honestly, the complementary breakfast was more important to me than the room I was in. I have a very specific breakfast diet when I’m travelling.
- Raisin Bran cereal with 2% milk
- Two peach yogurts
- A bowl of fresh fruit
- Eggs or bacon, but never waffles
- A glass of orange juice
I actually don’t eat yogurt at home. I also don’t eat as complete a breakfast. But, when I travel it’s both a ritual and fuel for what will probably be a longer than normal day. And I’ve heard that eating yogurt helps prevent food issues when you travel. It’s probably more accurate for international travel than the it is for the domestic travel that I do, but it can’t hurt.
And wifi is super important. I don’t need the fee-based high speed version. As a writer, I’m not stressing the connection. But, if there is no option, it wouldn’t matter what size room you put me in.
Recently my boss and I ended up in South Florida in a city on the Atlantic side. We opted for a Holiday Inn since it literally shared a parking lot with our call center. It was probably one of the more basic hotels I’ve been in when travelling for my current company. There was no closet, just a bar with some coat hangers on it. No microwave or mini refrigerator. Pretty much a bed and a TV. It was the epitome of “fine.” But, not in a nice way.
Honestly? I didn’t care. It was really close to the center. But, it didn’t have the breakfast bar. That I did care about.
We went to dinner with the client at a nice restaurant on the beach.
So, where are you guys staying?
There’s a Marriott Courtyard right next door. I slept with the windows open last night. The sound of the waves was pretty cool.
Guess where we are staying next time we go to that city in Florida?
I’m sure it will be fine. As long as it has a bed, wifi and a breakfast bar, I’ll be great with it.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Stephen Hawking died today. I know, I already wrote about him dying yesterday (Ad Astra: Stephen Hawking.) But, quite literally, that was yesterday when he died and this is today when he died.
I stopped and bought pie on the way home from work. A razzleberry pie, a peach pie and a coconut cream pie. It was pi day and the kids wanted pie. After all, it’s pi day: March 14, or expressed another way 3.14.
Albert Einstein was born today. Well, not today today, but on this date, March 14 back in 1879.
And of course, that’s why we are talking about those three topics: Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and pie. I wish I could say I was the first to notice the similarity of the three topics. I wasn’t. But, I did think of this topic before I realized that literally every newsite in the world was going to run with this angle.
Here’s the thing. All three of those coincidences are a lie. Not a single one of them is true. Oh, it’s true that Albert Einstein was born on March 14. It’s also true that Stephen Hawking died today (yesterday.) But, those two dates have less to do with pi than pie, which really only shares a auditory homonymic pronounciation.
But, Albert and Steven, while it’s mildly interesting that they share a birth/death date, were not born/died on pi day. In fact, the entire idea of pi day is very American-centric. It’s not pi day in the rest of the world. Really.
Saint Patrick’s Day is a bigger celebration in the United States than it is in Ireland.
Cinco de Mayo is a way bigger holiday in the United States than it is in Mexico.
Clearly, we love to party. Especially if we can associate food with it.
St Patrick’s day? Beer!
Cinco de Mayo? Margaritas!
Pi day? Pie!
But, the United States is virtually the only country in the world that insists on putting the month first when entering a date in numeric format. We type MM/DD/YYY. The rest of the world uses DD/MM/YYYY. Their way makes sense, if you think about it. The international standard goes from smallest measurements (days) to progressively larger unites (months and then years.)
And that’s why Einstein was not born on pi day. He was born in Ulm, Germany. So, his birthdate, using the format of the place of his birth is 14/3/1879. Not a silly math joke to be found.
The reason I can say that Hawking died yesterday on March 14, is that he died in England, early in the day. It was still March 13 here in the United States. For example, Americans know that the attack on Pearl Harbor that signaled the entrance of America into WWII happened on December 7, 1941. As President Roosevelt stated, “A date that will live in infamy.” However, the Japanese admirals planned to attack on December 8, 1941. They did. Because by the time the attack started it was already December 8 in Japan.
Stephen Hawking died on March 14 in Cambridge. The fact that I found out about it during March 13 is a quirk of the fact that our planet is round. England, like the rest of the world sans the United States writes dates as DD/MM/YYYY. So, Professor Hawking died on 14.3.2018. Again, not a date that lends itself to clever math jokes.
But, considering we are the counry that gave the world “International Talk Like A Pirate Day” (Sept 19) and got the rest of the world to to celebrate it with us, go ahead and think of two of the most brilliant scientists of the last three centurires entering and leaving this world on a date represented by the one of the most famous numbers in the world.
And have some pie, because . . . pie!
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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He was brilliant. Of course, he was brilliant. He was a theoretical physicist. I’m guessing not many of my regular readers are involved theoretical phisics. But, I’m guessing virtually all of my readers, or most at least, have heard of Stephen Hawking. He died today at the age of 76.
Professor Hawking was one of those rare men who transcended science. He became a pop icon. He was a regular on the Big Bang Theory. He wrote a bestselling book called, “A Brief History Of Time.” I read it. I even understood most of it. I’m pretty sure that Professor Hawking dumbed it down for most of us.
He was brilliant. And yet, we never heard his voice. He explained the vastness of the cosmos, but he couldn’t so much as take a step. ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, crippled his body.
It’s telling that no one says, “He was pretty successful considering his handicap.” Or, “He accomplished a lot for someone in his condition.” He wasn’t defined by his handicap. He was successful. He was brilliant. He also had a wicked sense of humor. The most famous scientist in the world died on Pi Day. Well, played professor. Well played.
He’s an inspriration to many people. If Professor Hawking can do what he did with the challenges he had to overcome, what’s my excuse? When I don’t want to get out of bed in the morning, I can consider that he couldn’t get out of bed on his own. And yet, he was successful enough for several lifetimes. His work on black holes is amazing. His efforts to bring physics to the masses is extraordinary.
He spoke out about the need for space travel. Not just because he was a scientist that studied space, but for the survival of mankind. He worried about how dangerous it was to remain on a single planet.
He’s now free from the physical limitations of his body. He may not have believed in an afterlife, but I like to think that rather than “Resting in Peace,” Professor Hawking is now free to travel the cosmos. Ad astra, Professor Hawking.
Stephen Hawking
January 8, 1942 – March 14, 2018
The end
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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You have not achieved perfection. You have merely guaranteed eventual failure.
Our clients grade us as a supplier every year. It’s a ten point scale and the competition is pretty fierce between the account managers for the T-Scores, as they are called. It’s not just the number. It’s the fact that the number is representative of how well we are meeting the client needs. A happy client is more likely to give us additional business.
I work very hard to satisfy my client. Last year, after coming close for the past several years, we finally achieved a 10. The score wasn’t only for my contribution, but I was an important part of the team. I was understandably happy with the results. My manager pointed out the downside of achieving a perfect 10.
Two things, Rodney. First, it’s going to be more difficult to get additional resources for your projects going forward.
What do you mean? The client is really happy with us.
Sure, but you’ve shown that you can achieve success with your current resources. Why would management need to give you additional?
Oh. . .I hadn’t thought of it that way.
And there’s another thing.
Yeah?
There’s only one direction to go from here.
He wasn’t denegrating my work. He was rightly pointing out that the best I can hope for next year is to maintain my level. It’s impossible to achieve a higher score. Naturally, I can still improve. The entire team can improve, but we need some other way to measure it than the T-score.
Or, we might miss a step and drop down to a 9, or worse an 8.
My personal review was this past month. I did really well. I work well with my team. I’ve been in my job long enough to completely understand what’s expected of me. I obviously work great with the client. And my evaluation score reflected it.
And I considered my former manager’s comments on our T-score. There’s a tendency to say, “What have you done for me lately?” You are often only as good as last success and potentially as bad as your next screw up. And there will be a next one. Just in the past week, twice I’ve shared what turned out to be confidential information with my extended team. Didn’t mean to. Just didn’t know it was not common knowledge.
I screw up. But, I also work very hard to minimize the screw ups and make sure I’m exceeding expectations in other areas as a sort of buffer against the inevitable setbacks.
So, yes, strive for perfection. When it comes to work and career, there is really no downside to being absolutely the best you can be at your job. Just realize that if you do achieve the highest possible ranking, there’s only one direction to go from there.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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- Fluidic Space
- Inversion Wave
- Quantum Singularity
- Quantum Slipstream Drive
- Spatial Distortion
- Subspace Vortex
- Transwarp Conduit
- Warp Jump
This post is about Star Trek Attack Wing. (Find a introduction to it here.)
WizKids, the manufacture of Star Trek Attack Wing recently posted an online notice banning not just a list of cards, but all cards of a particular type. (Read the notification here, or scroll down for the full text.)
This has never happened before. Unprecendented. Unheard of. This is something new.
Actually, if you consider it, every new release of a ship we’ve never seen before hasn’t happened before. With the new set of releases we have been introduced to Gold Pressed Latinum. It was unprecedented. We also got a Klingon/Ferengi b’rel ship. That was unheard of. We’ve had a flurry of W.O.R.F. rulings this month clarifying long standing rules questions. That was new.
My point is that even though WizKids has never banned a card before, we shouldn’t be shocked. They do new stuff all the time. And actually, they have banned a few cards.
Let’s look at some of these banned cards. I’m not sure what it says about my obsessive personality that I own multiple copies of each of these cards.
Fluidic Space
Faction: Species 8472
Ship: Bioship Beta
Instead of making a normal move, you may discard this card to remove your ship from the play area and immediately place it back anywhere in the play area, but not within Range 1-2 of any other ship. You cannot attack or perform any Actions on the round you use this ability. This Upgrade costs +5 SP if purchased for a non-Species 8472 ship and no ship may be equipped with more than 1 “Fluidic Space” Upgrade.
Inversion Wave
Faction: Independent (Ferengi)
Ship: Quark’s Treasure
Instead of making a normal move, you may discard this card to place your ship anywhere in the play area within Range 1-3 of your current position. Remove all Tokens (except Critical Hit Tokens) from beside your ship and place an Auxiliary Power Token beside your ship. You cannot attack on the round you use this ability. No ship may be equipped with more than 1 “Inversion Wave” Upgrade.
.
Quantum Singularity
Faction: Species 8472
Ship: Bioship Alpha
ACTION: Discard this card to remove your ship from the play area and discard all Tokens that are beside your ship except for Auxiliary Power Tokens. During the End Phase, place your ship back in the play area. You cannot place your ship within Range 1-3 of any other ship. This Upgrade may only be purchased for a Species 8472 ship.
.
Quantum Slipstream Drive
Faction: Independent
Ship: U.S.S. Dauntless
If you reveal a maneuver with a speed of 5 or greater, before performing the maneuver, you may discard this card to remove your ship from the play area and discard all tokens from beside your ship except for Auxiliary Power Tokens. Then, immediately place it back in the play area, but not within Range 1-3 of any other ship. You cannot attack during the round you use this ability.
.
Spatial Distortion
Faction: Independent/Mirror Universe
Ship: Kyana Prime
ACTION: Discard this card to remove your ship from the play area and discard all Tokens that are beside your ship except for Auxiliary Power Tokens. During the End Phase, place your ship back in the play area. You cannot place your ship within Range 1-3 of any enemy ship. This Upgrade may only be purchased for Krenim weapon ship.
.
Subspace Vortex
Faction: Independent (Xindi)
Ship: Weapon Zero
ACTION: Discard this card to remove your ship from the play area and discard all Tokens that are beside your ship except for Auxiliary Power Tokens. Immediately place your ship back anywhere in the play area, but not within Range 1-3 of any enemy ship. You cannot attack during the round you use this Action. This Upgrade may only be purchased for a Xindi ship.
.
Transwarp Conduit
Faction: Borg
Ship: Soong
ACTION: Discard this card to remove your ship from the play area and discard all Tokens that are beside your ship except for Auxiliary Power Tokens. During the End Phase, place your ship back in the play area. You cannot place your ship within Range 1-3 of any other ship. This Upgrade may only be purchased for a Borg ship.
.
–
Warp Jump
Faction: Federation
Ship: U.S.S. Hathaway
At the start of the Combat Phase, before any attacks have been made, you may discard this card to remove your ship from the play area. At the end of the Combat Phase, after all other ships have attacked, place your ship anywhere in the play area, but not within Range 1-3 of any other ship. All Tokens that were beside your ship are removed. You cannot attack during the round in which you use this ability.
.
Warp Jump-Like
All of these cards have been lumped under the category of “Warp Jump-like” cards. Rather than limit themselves to a specific list of cards, WizKids banned a functionality.
From this day forward, all cards that grant Warp Jump-like effects are now banned from tournament play. A Warp Jump-like effect is any effect which removes a ship from the play area and then places it in the play area in a different position either immediately or at a later time.
WizKids then listed the current group of banned cards sans the Transwarp Conduit card. First let’s address the Borg Transwarp Conduit. It should be allowed, right? I mean, it’s not on the ban list, so it’s good, right?
Wrong. WizKids didn’t ban individual cards. They banned “all cards that grant Warp Jump-like effects.” Here’s what Warp Jump says:
At the start of the Combat Phase, before any attacks have been made, you may discard this card to remove your ship from the play area. At the end of the Combat Phase, after all other ships have attacked, place your ship anywhere in the play area, but no within Range 1-3 of any other ship. All Tokens that were beside your ship are removed. You cannot attack during the round in which you use this ability.
Here’s what Transwarp Conduit says:
ACTION: Discard this card to remove your ship from the play area and discard all Tokens that are beside your ship except for Auxiliary Power Tokens. During the End Phase, place your ship back in the play area. You cannot place your ship within Range 1-3 of any enemy ship. This Upgrade may only be purchased for a Borg ship.
“But, Rodney, they aren’t exactly the same. We are a game of details. Transwarp Conduits has ships come back in the End Phase, not the Combat Phase. They are different! It shouldn’t be banned!”
You’re right. The text isn’t exactly the same. Maybe they wanted it done differently. Except, let’s look at the Spatial Distortion Upgrade card.
ACTION: Discard this card to remove your ship from the play area and discard all Tokens that are beside your ship except for Auxiliary Power Tokens. During the End Phase, place your ship back in the play area. You cannot place your ship within Range 1-3 of any enemy ship. This Upgrade may only be purchased for a Krenim weapon ship.
That is a direct cut-and-past from the Transwarp Conduit card text. All I did was swap out the Borg ship with Krenim weapon ship. Obviously, WizKids wanted to ban Transwarp Conduit. It’s why they banned a type of card. For example, Quantum Singularity also has the exact same text. Except it says Species 8472 ship.
“But, it’s still not on the list! The list is the thing! We live and die by our lists! Only cards on the list are banned!”
Not exactly. Think about Subspace Vortex. We showed it above. It is on the list, so it should be banned. No question. But, what about Subspace Vortex? No, not that Subspace Vortex, the other Subspace Vortex.
The second one is on the list. Should it also be banned? Nope. The 5SP Subspace Vortex is clearly not a Warp Jump-type card. It helps you go fast, but doesn’t let you remove your ship from the play area. I think this is why WizKids banned the functionality, not just a specific list of cards.
Why do this?
Several online posters have asked “Why would WizKids go to this extreme?” Are these cards really that dangerous?
In a word, yes. These cards, especially Warp Jump, break the game. With the addition of Gold Pressed Latinum and the ability to bring back discarded cards, the problems get even worse.
Recently I wrote an article about “Unbeatable Builds.” The Warp Jump build was simply called “The Build.” Some of the best players in the game set out to test if Warp Jump could help you win in a way that was unbeatable. Robert Fletcher, Tucker Coby and Joseph Van Der Jagt playtested it extensively. They determined that Warp Jump would not only allow you to win every single time, but you would do it in a way that was really, really boring.
Essentially, you could steal a card from your opponent and then use Warp Jump-like cards to run away until the time ran out.
WizKids sponsors regular tournaments, including National and World championships. It’s terrible for a tournament if you know coming in that a particular person is going to win. Sure that was okay for golf when Tiger Woods was still a golfer, but for the most part, you want some balance. And the game is called Attack Wing. Not steal something and run away and hide for an hour Wing. The Warp Jump-type cards let people win games, and tournaments without actually attacking anyone. That’s not how the game was designed to be played.
“But, Rodney, banned? They’ve never banned a card before. Banning doesn’t fix anything. I built my entire fleet around these cards. I spent a bunch of money to buy multiple copies of the USS Hawthorn (the ship that Warp Jump came with.)”
Actually, WizKids has a long history of banning cards. They’ve banned over 30 of them. They ban a card every couple of months. Most recently they banned Condition Alert.
The next card to be banned will be Scan Cycle.
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Everyone accepts the idea that Resources get banned. Sure, we call it retiring them. But, there is no real difference between a banned card and a retired card. Neither type is playable in tournaments. In all other ways, you can choose to use them. If your friendly local game store likes to use Warp Jump-type cards, they can do that. If you want to play with your friends, and use these cards, you certainly can. But, in a tournament, you cannot use these type cards. Just as you cannot use retired (banned) resources in a tournament.
Is it new for WizKids to ban upgrade cards?
Of course. In fact, I can completely sympathize with those players who bought extra ships to try to get these cards and use them in their fleets. In fact, here is my personal collection of newly banned cards.
I have a few. They are all now obsolete.
What doesn’t grow dies. There have been many exciting additions from WizKids in the past year. Some of the changes have been easy to adopt. Some have been more challenging. Some are still causing some headscratching and frequent double checking of the rulebook.
What doesn’t grow, dies. It’s exciting to see Star Trek Attack Wing growing, alive and well.
Here is the complete text of the WizKids announcement. Read it on the WizKids site here.
Welcome Star Trek: Attack Wing Fans!
Since the inception of the new rulebook we’ve paid great attention to the buzz amongst the community and the feedback our play-testers have given us. More frequently than anything else, we often hear about Warp Jump-like effects as well as stealing cards.
For those of you not familiar with Warp Jump-like effects, they allow you to remove your ship from the play area and place it back either immediately or at a later time. With strategic planning, a skilled player can both negate the positioning aspect of Star Trek: Attack Wing and completely avoid combat while forcing opposing ships to maneuver through Cloaked Mines. Both of these things are bad in a dogfighting game that’s built around combat and maneuvering. Furthermore, the way in which scoring for stolen cards works in conjunction with Warp Jump-like effects means a player can steal cards from a ship, earn points for them, then avoid combat for the rest of the game. By using this tactic via Warp Jump-like effects, they ultimately win with the handful of points they got from stealing a card. This is a problem that goes against the spirit of the game.
Today, we’re going to do something about both Warp Jump-like effects and stealing. While looking for an appropriate solution to these problems, we looked at multiple solutions such as making all Warp Jump-like effects unique or making it so that stolen cards don’t reward points to anyone. After discussing and testing we found that some of these solutions were too much and others were not enough. Ultimately, we settled on the below solutions.
From this day forward, all cards that grant Warp Jump-like effects are now banned from tournament play. A Warp Jump-like effect is any effect which removes a ship from the play area and then places it in the play area in a different position either immediately or at a later time. This DOES NOT include docking and launching shuttlecrafts because docking and launching are two separate abilities. Below is a current list of cards that are now disallowed in tournaments:
• Warp Jump
• Quantum Slipstream Drive
• Fluidic Space
• Spatial Distortion
• Quantum Singularity
• Subspace Vortex
• Inversion Wave
In regards to stealing, we are now treating it like discarding for the purposes of scoring. Now, instead of points being scored per card stolen, any card that is stolen, assimilated, discarded, removed from play, or otherwise removed from a ship will only be scored by the opposing player once that ship is destroyed. This means that if you steal my Mr. Spock Crew Upgrade from my U.S.S. Enterprise, you WILL NOT earn points for him until the U.S.S. Enterprise he was previously equipped to is destroyed.
We truly appreciate all of the constructive criticism and patience we’ve received from all of our fans. We’re very dedicated to making Star Trek: Attack Wing the best that it can be so please continue to let us know how YOU, the fans, think we can make Star Trek: Attack Wing better and better!
Live Long and Prosper,
-The WizKids Team
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Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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You know that dream where you are taking that test that you haven’t prepared for?
This wasn’t like that. It was more like taking a test that you knew you were going to ace. Except it was like that dream because it was a performance review, which is like a test.
My company does performance reviews annually on your hiring anniversary. I got to do mine today.
I hate performance reviews. You might think it’s because I do poorly on them. Last year, I was really struggling. Not in my job. I was doing fantastic. The client loved me. My coworkers loved me. Everybody loved me. Everybody except my boss. Oh, and his boss. Like oil and water, no matter how much we shook up our relationship, we couldn’t seem to coalesce. If you are going to pick one person at your job to not have a problem with, it should be your manager.
He tried. I tried. Everybody tried and it was just getting worse. And then it came time for my review. I hate reviews. (Oh, I said that already. But, yeah, it’s important to this part of the story.) I wrote my review and evaluated myself on the various parts of the review form. I new it wasn’t going to go great. And I think it’s an employee’s responsibility as much as the manager to form a good working relationship.
I put myself down for a moderate review score. It was still too high.
My manager went through and did his portion of the review and it became obvious that we were not only not on the same page, we weren’t even in the same book. He rated me substantially lower than I’d rated myself.
Okay. That was kind of expected and we worked through the appeal process and finally sent a review to HR with two sets of scores. Mine on one page, his on the other.
Fortunately, it was right around that time that the company did a slight reorg. Well, it was smaller than slight. It was a reorg of one. Me.
I ended up with the same job, but a completley different management structure. New Manager, and the freedom to perform my job in the way I wanted. I ran with it. My new manager and I meshed like peanut butter and jelly. We accomplished some amazing things. We completely revamped our IT infrastructure for four locations across the US. We created new processes. We sailed through our annual audits.
It was awesome.
We are back to review time. Again, I’m back writing my own review. I have utmost confidence and trust in my manager, so I had no urge to skew the numbers at all. If I thought I deserved a 2 in a particular area I was struggling at, I put a 2. If I thought I deserved a 5 in an area I was excelling at, I put a five. At the end I gave myself a slightly better than average overall score. It was one I felt very comfortable with. Being comfortable with my score did not mean I was comfortable with the review process. I still hate reviews. To me, it really is like taking a test. Except I enjoy tests more than review meetings.
My manager is located on the East coast and I’m in Utah. So, it was a Skype meeting. He delayed the meeting for a few minutes while he reset his VPN connection to ensure it wouldn’t time out during the call.
The review went exactly as I expected. Well, slightly better since on several areas I’d rated myself a 3 and my manager bumped it to a 4. Not a lot of areas, but a few. He agreed with the 2’s and we talked about how to improve those. He agreed with the 5’s and congratulated me on my hard work.
We were at the last page. The page were the final review score was recorded. . .and my internet connection died. Well, it died and immediately came back. Did I mention that I’m the IT guy on my boss’s team? I’m the guy they look to when their are technical issues. Once I got back reconnected, he found it particularly amusing that it was my side of the connection that had died.
And right at the best part!
I’d given myself a better than average score. My boss did not agree. He gave me an outstanding score. Apparently I tend to give away too much of the credit on my projects. I think he ranked me a little too high, but given last year’s review, I said I’d take it.
You’d think that being told you’re not only doing well, you’re doing better than you thought, would relieve all the pressure that led up to the review.
You’d be wrong. I still hate reviews. I admit, I hated this one a little less than most.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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…so logon today for great car deals at carsales.com
It hardly registered, the website address. No one has “operators standing by to take your call” anymore. We don’t think twice about buying things over the web. I remember when web commerce first started. I found myself very hesitant to share my credit card number with any website. Eventually, I started buying baseball tickets from www.ticketmaster.com. And I remember buying music from early versions of www.amazon.com. I think it was amazon. It was a long time ago. Way back in the last century.
It took a while for consumers and advertisers alike to become comfortable with the web as a way of exchanging money. More interesting to watch was how much challenge the advertisers had with the prefix “www.” It’s just three little letters, but they represent a problem for audio and video ads. “W” is the longest letter in the alphabet. It was the worst possible letter to force advertisers to say. Let along repeat it three times. If you think about that ABC song, every letter of the alphabet except W has something in common. They are all one syllable. “W” is three times as long. WWW, when spoken is longer than many sentences. “Operators are standing by” is only eight syllables, for example.
In a 30 second radio spot, advertisers cram a lot of words. Correction, a lot of syllables. That nine syllable double-U double-U double-U was murder on their word rate. Eventually, of course, it went away. You might think that it was never even needed. Isn’t www.seattlemariners.com the same as seattlemariners.com?
Today it is, but that wasn’t always the case. Most people know the www stands for World Wide Web. This name was coined by the brilliant British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. He’s the real father of the World Wide Web and what we today think of as the interent. (Sorry, Al Gore.)
In 1991, Berners-Lee had pretty much built most of the pieces needed for the modern World Wide Web. He’d built
- HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
- HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
- Access to Usenet (The early file sharing service)
- Access to FTP (File Transfer Protocol, A file download/upload service)
These names were geeky names. They made sense to computer science guys the same way the crazy latin names of a newly discovered breed of lizard makes sense to herpetologists. (People who study lizards.)
But, Berners-Lee was missing one more piece before he had his early prototype of the interent. He needed a browser. The software that you are using to read this right now. He needed to come up with a name. He consdiered Mine of Information (MOI), The Information Mine (TIM), Information Mesh. And given the cryptic names for the rest of the pieces, it wouldn’t have been surprising if he’d picked something, well, geeky. He picked WorldWideWeb. That was actually the name of the first browser.
But, that still doesn’t explain why web addresses have the www on the front. It’s because the browser was only one protocol of many that was supported by this new system. For example, you could use a www addresss to get to a web pages of a site. But, you would use ftp to get to the file portion. Even today, for example, you can type ftp.microsoft.com into a browser and get to the file sharing portion of Microsoft’s site.
Berners-Lee had a vision of what his creation could become. I’m not saying he imagined the way the internet of things has taken over, but he understood that the system was expandable. It’s why he described it as a web. Today “the web” has become synonomous with “the internet.”
One final thought on names and the web. The web today is full of various types of traffic, ftp file transfers, http web pages, smtp emails, sFTP b2b and c2b traffic. But, the most common programs traversing the web, by far are programs used by search engines like Google. The reason you can go to google.com and ask it for the location of stuff on the web is that google programs spend a lot of time traversing the web. They catalog every site and document every thread. They are constantly crawling over every web page and internet site 24 hours per day.
There’s a name for these types of programs. They are called spiders.
You’re welcome.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
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LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I’m not sure if I’m lazy, stupid or just distracted. I think I’m smarter than the average person. I receive plenty of accolades for my work. I don’t think I’m stupid. “Imposter Syndrome” not withstanding, I’m pretty sure I haven’t been faking it all these years.
No, definitely not stupid. I’m smart enough to do this and figure it out. So, that leave lazy or distracted. I should pick distracted, right? I mean, given the choice, who is going to describe themselves as lazy? The internet is forever. There’s a possibility that some future employer might find this entry. I definitely don’t want to describe myself as lazy. I’m sure that is not the response to the interiew question, “What’s your worst trait?”
The problem is that lazy and distracted look so similar. If you have a task to get done and you keep putting it off and finding other things to do, how do you describe that?
I have terrible ADHD. If you’re one of those people who think it’s all in my mind, you are 100% correct. ADHD is an imbalance in the brain. If you are one of those people who think it doesn’t exist, I’m happy for you. You’re dead wrong, but I’m happy that you don’t have to struggle with it. Yeah, it’s truly a condition.
I’ve had it my whole life, but only been aware of it the last few years. Most days I can keep it under control. Caffiene helps. . .a lot. I could get a perscription for Ritilin or Aderahl or a knockoff. They would help. They are also amphetimephes. They are prescription drugs with a high rate of addiction. I have an addictive personality. I know this about myself. I don’t want addictive drugs. I might like them too much.
So, caffiene it is. Sometimes lots.
That helps me focus, but focus on what? Like you, I have lots of stuff I need to do in my job. I have a long list of tasks and projects. Well, that’s not exactly true. I have a lot of things, but they don’t always make it on to the list. They should, but that’s part of my problem.
I know that I am most effective when I make a TODO list and then focus on one item at a time. I often do make lists. The days I do, I get more done. But, every morning there is one item I have trouble putting on my TODO list:
TODO #1: Make a todo list
I know that if I just make the list, I’ll be off and running. And yet, the act of making the list is an ordered task. I have trouble focusing on unordered tasks. The treatment is the solution, but it’s also the problem.
Today was a pretty good day. I made a list. I crossed things off the list. It’s 11:45pm and the last item on the list for today is,
TODO: Write a blog post about todo lists
I’ve managed to get this one done for the past four years without missing a day. So, maybe it’s not laziness. Of course, I try to post before 7:00AM. So, yeah, definitely going to go with distracted.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved