Wise words from a wise man

From my comments, posted by my Grandad:

"Regarding yesterday and the overheated server room.
why in these days of technology can't there be such a thing as a temperature sensor in the server room to set an alarm at some ones house so as some one can be on call out."


Today we placed an order for an environmental monitoring unit. It has sensors to monitor temperature (in case of overheating or fire), humidity (in case there is too much moisture in the room), the door (in case of a break-in) and vibrations (presumably in case of earthquake?).

Just goes to show, great minds think alike ;o)

Civilisation

So...
This is a post about a game that I play so if you aren't interested in reading about it then skip this post.

The game in brief:
Civilisation the board game is based on a pc game which is hugely successful.
You basically build up a civilisation (surprise surprise) starting from the Ancient era, working your way through the Medieval era, the Industrial era and ending in the Modern era.
You play on a huge map of the world which is broken up into different areas and a town can be built in each area to provide you with resources with which to increase your wealth and build up an army, increase your tech level etcetc.
I just read that paragraph and I thought I'd better mention that the game is slightly more complicated than I make it seem. Think Risk, only a hundred times more complicated.

Initial comments:
The game takes ages to play - when we played on Saturday night we played from about 9pm until 1am and only got through the Ancient era. Fortunately it is entirely worth the investment of time because the game is top-notch. Really you need to either be playing somewhere where you can leave the game set up and play over multiple nights or you need to play all day on a weekend or something like that.

Problems:
There are problems with tha game although how you can get around them is beyond me. One problem is the random resource generation. What happens is that most areas on the map have an individual resource. Some are blank and some have other more nasty effects (ie the plague). Each individual resource gives you more money per turn and if you can get a monopoly on a resource (3 or more) then you get huge amounts of cash each turn. The problem with this is that someone always loses out on the resouce distribution. Unfortunately this generally means that they are playing the game at a huge disadvantage and if they dont get wiped out really early on it is only because the other players feel sorry for them and leave them alone so that they can at least keep playing. Even this is pointless though because they have no chance to really win as they will always be behind on economy.
The second problem is also to do with the resource distribution. If you get a monopoly early on then you are a target. There are no two ways about it. A monopoly is really powerful and the only way for the other players to keep up is to beat you down until you are no longer a threat.

Our games:
Russ like to play fairly peacefully although any (and I mean ANY) slight move against him will be treated as an act of war and Russ will do everything he can (including taking himself out of the game) to do as much damage to you as possible.
Adam is a complete pacifist. He will only build army units to be used in defense and I don't recall him ever retaliating to an attack either.
Reece is still a bit of an unknown quantity but in our last game he had an opportunity to attack Russ and walk away with some easy territory but chose not to. I know Reece too well to chalk this up to his wanting to play the game peacefully - my best guess is that attacking Russ would have left me in a better position so he chose to not increase his own power in order to keep my power down.
Badger is entirely untrustworthy. He plays fairly conservatively so as to ensure that he does not draw attention to himself but if he sees an oppertunity he will take it. In our last game he waited until I was tied up fending off Russ and then stole a key territory from me. If the game had continued much longer I think he almost certainly would have attacked me in force.

Overall I can definately say "trust no-one" in this game. No matter what treaties you agree on or how peacefully someone seems to be playing, if they see an oppertunity to attack without fear of retaliation then they will take it. A perfect example of this is my situation with Badger in our last game. We had lots of trade going on and there was no real reason to attack each other. Badger made some troops movements which were in my general direction but he claimed he was setting them up to invade Reece who was indeed a more obvious target (lots of land to protect and not many troops to do it with). The time came for attacking Reece (Badger bought a ship) and Badger took one of my territories...

As for myself, I suppose I can't be trusted in this game either. I would like to get some decent peace treaties going with some people and build power from that but it never seems to go that way.
In the last game we played I deliberately placed one of my starting units next to Russ so that we could trade but in the end Russ wouldn't trade and I noticed that he was weak and took one of his territories to bring down his economy. In turn Russ launched a full scale war against me and although I won the war I suffered huge losses and was in quite a weak position.

So anyway, I've rambled enough now I think. No doubt Russ and Badger will have some comments to post about what I have said :-) The only conclusions I can really draw from the games I have played are 1. pray for decent resources - if you don't get them then you never really get into the game at all. 2. don't trust anyone. with the exception of Adam, everyone I have played against has gone back on their word at one point or another. 3. try not to attract attention to yourself. it's difficult to do but if you make yourself into an attractive target then someone (or everyone) will come for you.

ttfn

No worries mate

So anyway, I didn't get in trouble yesterday at all - it was forgotten almost immediately. In fact I then went on to receive a bottle of champagne at the company quarterly awards which was pretty cool.
Cheers to everyone who posted in reply to my post on Monday. There are a couple of people who I know read my blog who haven't posted yet so it looks like my readership is in the region of 7 or 8 people. Wahey! Maybe soon I'll be into double numbers...
I have started writing a post about Civilsation the board game but it isn't finished yet so watch this space for that. I'm trying to make it interesting to read rather than just a ramble by me so it's taking a bit longer than I anticipated.

The problem with tech support

The problem with tech support apart from the users creating problems left, right and centre is that occasionally something important goes wrong. On those days you do not want to be the first techie in the office.
So this morning I was on the early shift. I arrive at the office to find all of the machines down. I won't go into too much depth about the technology we use but all of our machines run from one server. In fact there are two servers just in case one goes down. So I arrive and all the machines are down. This either means that both servers have gone down overnight (quite unlikely) or that something more fundamental is wrong.
I call Cliff (the systems guy) since I don't have a clue where to even start fixing the problem and he tells me not to touch anything since it sounds quite serious and he will be in shortly.
Ten minutes later he arrives and I get a call asking what the first thing I should do when I arrive in the office is. Apparently (although its the first I have heard about it) I am supposed to check the server room when I arrive to make sure there are no obvious problems. Having been told by Cliff not to do anything at all I fairly obviously hadn't checked the server room. If I had checked the server room I probably would have noticed that the air-con had packed in and that our server room could now double as a sauna.
Fortunately everything seems ok now although I am slightly concerned that I might get in trouble for not knowing about checking the server room every morning...

NEVER MOVE HOUSE

If you take my advice then never move house. It was confirmed on Thursday that we had to be out of our house by lunch time on Friday which was not well received news.
Thursday night Reece and Kieran came over and along with myself packed their cars full and did a couple of runs to Sale to move our stuff. Laura got really stressed and ended up throwing her phone across the room and locking herself in the bathroom - that's the level of stress we had. When I got back at just before 11pm, I picked us up a KFC (just before they shut) as we hadnt had a chance to eat by then. When I got the KFC back to our house and we were all snuggled up in bed ready to eat it I opened to bag to find that some of the order was missing. I was not impressed. I went straight back round there and got it sorted out. Moral of the story - check your order when it is given to you, not when you get home. Otherwise you can guarantee that the one night when you have already had enough stress will be the one night when they get your order wrong. The law of the sod.
Anyway, Friday wasnt much better. I had planned to take the morning off work to finish moving and head over to the office about lunch time but it became pretty obvious fairly early on that there was no way we would be done in time.
Big thanks go out to several people for helping us out:
Laura's grandad came over and moved our cooker and washing machine. We got the cooker over to Sale and then got a call from Laura to say that someone had called wanting to buy the cooker and could we bring it back to Warrington again. Great timing. At least we sold it anyway.
Russel was great - he helped out all day carrying, lifting, driving etc even though we started really early and Russ looked like he hadnt been to bed :-)
And finally a big thankyou to Russ's dad who saved the day by coming and moving our fridge/freezer for us when we discovered we had no vehicle big enough to fit it in.
A hugely stressful day not made any easier by the fact that Rob called about the mortgage to let us know that we needed to provide proof of address details to amend the mortgage. The few proof of address documents that I had were in a random place unknown to me so we were a bit stuck on that one. I went to the bank to see if they could print me a statement - they were happy to print me a statement but not one with my address on so it was a bit useless.
Anyway, after a hugely stressful day me and russ ended up in the weatherspoons pub starving to death because we hadnt had a chance to eat anything yet and laura was taking ages to get ready to come and join us. We got food in the end and then some idiot started setting off fireworks - hopefully one day he will set one off and do some damage to himself - so we left and went to the met pub instead. The music was far too loud in the met and there were very few people in there so it was highly boring and laura started stressing because apparently me and russ were being boring but unfortunately there was little to be done about it. We ended up going to waterside - the new trendy bar in Sale which sucked big time so we only had one pint there before we went home.

Saturday I finally tracked down a document which *should* be ok for the mortgage so we took that over to Bridgfords in Sale. After I tried to buy a sandwich from Dodgers but unfortunately they had decided to stop making sandwiches and to be fair I dont think it was that late so I told them plainly that I would go spend my money somewhere else.
Saturday afternoon me and Laura went to buy Laura's mum a helecopter flight for her birthday on Sunday and then Saturday evening Russ, Adam, Badger, Reece and me all played a game of Civilisation the board game which was pretty cool although we didnt have nearly enough time to finish which was a shame. I'll do a post later about the Civilisation board game because I dont think I've done one yet.

Sunday was very much a day of rest for me. Laura and Reece went to a carboot sale in the morning and Laura went out with her Grandparents in the afternoon so I spent pretty much the whole day on the internet just browsing the day away. Sunday night we rented "Runaway Jury" which was a pretty good film.

And now we come to now. Monday morning at work. Wahey. I'm pretty tired this morning after quite a stressful weekend. I can't go to waterbowl this week because the company quarterly meeting is the same night so that's a bit of a shame (even though I'm still considering leaving the league).

Oh and before I forget, I found out last week that my grandad reads my blog which is pretty cool. I'd quite like to get an idea of my readership so if you read my blog then please can you post a comment letting me know who you are. To post a comment you click on the link below that says "0 comments" (or more if people have already posted) and on the next page click "post a comment". Dont bother signing up - just post anonymously and include your name in the post. Cheers!