And Still I Persist

I have long felt that Rudy Giuliani is our best bet for the 44th President of the United States; quite frankly, I would vote for him regardless of what party ticket he ran upon. The reasons are quite simple:

1. We’re at war and will be for the foreseeable future.
2. Guiliani was nearly killed in the 9/11 attacks; many people he knew and worked with were killed; and he attended funeral after funeral of those he didn’t know but who died in the line of duty; in short, he knows we’re at war.
3. I have nine children (ten, including our semi-adopted daughter, Jeni). One has served in the Army National Guard; one is an active duty Marine who expects to be deployed to Iraq late this year or sometime next year; and one is in the process of enlisting in the Navy along with her husband (though both may switch over to the Marines instead).
4. I also have nine grandchildren.

Those factors trump any disagreement that I might have with Giuliani over social policy. I’d love to see Condi Rice as his VP, but personally I don’t care whom he picks.

While I have never served in the military myself, I came close; my draft number was 4, and had the draft still been in effect when I returned from two years of missionary service in Central America, I would have enlisted in the Navy. Beyond that, I grew up as a Navy brat; at ages 5 through 7, I played on abandoned Japanese pillboxes in the jungle outside of Subic Bay (in the Philippine Islands) and went on a family outing to Corregidor (where we found empty bullet and shell casings) a mere 15 years after WWII had ended.

I was a Navy brat because my father, John Webster, spent 29 years in the U.S. Navy — enlisting when he was 17, in mid-1941, and retiring in February 1970. He was at Pearl Harbor and the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal on board the U.S.S. San Francisco; after that, he went stateside, got kicked out of OCS (for slugging a trainer), received Naval training as a radioman, trained with the Marines at the newly-established Camp Pendleton (where my son Jon is today), and then went ashore with the third wave of Marines during the U.S. invasion of Guam. At that point, he was barely 20 years old, younger than any of my children are now. (Perspective: those three actions combined lasted a total of about 24 days and cost over 7,000 American lives.) He went on to serve around the world, including two (2) tours of duty, each about a year long, over in Vietnam.

In short, my father put his life on the line repeatedly for our country and our freedom over a 30-year period. My mom and us kids likewise made our sacrifices, living for years in Naval housing, moving frequently and often long distances (I was almost born in French Morocco), and making do on Navy pay. In turn, some of my own children have chosen likewise to serve and protect our country in the Armed Forces.

Beyond all that, I am a student of history in general and military history in particular. The patterns and lessons are pretty clear, whether you study the Pelopponesian War or the Vietnam War. War is ugly, horrific, destructive, corroding and corrupting; unfortunately, at times the alternative is, in the end, even worse. Furthermore, history shows that all wars (especially the so-called “Good War” of WW II) have been filled with the blunders, stupidities, tragedies, atrocities and setbacks that have caused such hand-wringing over the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. In fact, compared to any previous US war, these last two conflicts have been better run, more humane, more professional, less bloody, less destructive, and at least a few orders of magnitude more efficient.

I recently noted to Sandra (my wife) that about the only time that I use profanities is when I’m talking about Members of Congress. I don’t know what it is about that institution, but the general history of Congress during the periods leading up to WWI and WWII, after Vietnam (with the abandonment of South Vietnam), through much of the Cold War, and now during the Century War is usually one of self-absorption, political grandstanding and/or cowardice, and overall short-sightedness. There are reasons why histories about US wars usually do not focus on how Congress helped win them — if anything, usually the opposite.

For example, go read up on Congressional rhetoric and actions to impede any US action or involvement in WW II — up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. And Congress did so in spite of the very real possibility of the entire British Empire (England and Australia included) falling to the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, and Italy), just as the rest of Europe, key parts of China and Africa, and much of Southeast Asia and the Pacific already had. I think that much of FDR’s domestic policies and efforts were questionable and in some cases a disaster — but I thank God he was re-elected in 1940, or the world today (and quite possibly America itself) would look very different.

And so I have to depend upon the President to prosecute the Long War in spite of Congressional stupidity. I have largely agreed with Bush’s aims and strategy (including the so-called Bush Doctrine); what he has lacked, quite frankly, is the ability and willingness to inspire and lead the general populace, as well the unpleasant ruthlessness — within his own administration as well as against a determined enemy — required to prosecute a war (again, go study our successful War Presidents, in particular Lincoln and Roosevelt). Of all the declared and potential candidates, Giuliani has the best credentials and skills to do that. And so that’s who I plan to support, even if it means changing my party registration from Democrat to Republican so that I can vote for him in the primaries.

I would urge you to consider doing likewise. ..bruce..

Bruce F. Webster
Parker, Colorado

The Daily WTF is one of my daily reads. Subtitled “Curious perversions in information technology”, it allows readers to submit wretched source code examples, IT development horror stories, and similar cringe-inducing true-life accounts. (It’s fun to read the comments on source code postings; they bring to mind the old joke, “Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Thirty-seven; one to change it, and thirty-six to say, ‘I could have done that better.’”)

Anyway, today’s Daily WTF has a story about a children’s tour of a corporate data center on ‘Take Your Child To Work Day’:

Imagine how exciting a modern data center like the one at Robert’s organization would be for a child. Bright lights, multiple backup UPS systems, redundant AC units, and a very powerful generator out back to ensure there can never be an outage. Several giant systems housing multi-terabyte storage arrays, four huge IBM P695’s, and a few hundred other servers. Super high tech security to restrict physical access to the datacenter and a round-the-clock staff of fourteen administrators to lord over it all. I’m sure quite a few of you were getting excited just thinking about all that. Really, could there be a more awesome place to take the kiddies to see what millions of dollars of computer equipment looks like?

The CIO, a big fan of Take-Your-Child-To-Work Day, would give a fun presentation on how much computing power the organization required and then lead the kids on a tour of the data center. They loved it, and there were never any real problems. Well, until that one year when one little tyke couldn’t resist the temptation of The Big Red Button….

Read the rest over there (and be sure to read the comments as well).  ..bruce..

OK, so I praised a simple dungeon-crawl game that can be completed in 30 minutes. You may ask, why?

Well, here’s this report (in the New York Times, no less) by Seth Schiesel about The Burning Crusade, the new expansion to the massively-multiplayer on-line role playing game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft:

The big draw in massively-multiplayer online games like WOW is that they bring together thousands of people into one shared real-time virtual world. And so when a new expansion arrives, providing a bunch of new areas to explore, a natural land rush mentality can emerge among some players as they compete to conquer the new content.

In the new World of Warcraft expansion, called The Burning Crusade, that has been the race to level 70. Since the original game was released in 2004, characters have been capped in power at an arbitrary level 60. The main attraction in TBC is that it raises the level cap to 70 and provides a host of powerful benefits who players who reach that plateau – first among them the ability to fly, or at least to buy a flying mount like a gryphon.

Each of WOW’s hundreds of servers, or copies of the game world, is home to thousands of players. (The game has more than 8 million subscribers total.) And so on each server – within each community - the big question on many players’ lips as the expansion approached was “Who will be the first to level 70?”, “Who will be the first player flying around?”

I am proud to report that on my server, it was me. After racking up about 76 hours of playtime in a little more than 4.5 days of real time, shortly after 4 pm Saturday my warlock became the first character to hit level 70 on my server. Unhealthy? Probably. Exhilarating? Definitely.

Thirty minutes at a sitting (for a complete game, no less) is more healthy than 15 hours/day for five days in order to move from level 60 to level 70. At least, IMHO.

But beyond that, I am far more impressed by minimalist game design — that is, letting complexity emerge from a small, carefully selected set of rules. The ultimate example of that is Go, a game I learned in college (for a graduate CS class in artificial intelligence). Go has only nine rules and is played by placing black and white stones on a grid, but it is such a tough and subtle game that computers have made only slow progress in playing against humans. I’m also a big fan of FreeCell, a solitaire card game found on Windows systems, because it is (a) simple, (b) quick to finish, and (c) in most cases (though not all) winnable — which keeps me poking at a given game, even when I appear to be stuck.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t like big, complex games; indeed, my favorite genre is the 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) class of games, such as the Civilization series, the Galactic Civilization series (no relationship), and my all-time favorite, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (alas, it is now dated and over-played by me; Firaxis Games should really come up with a new-and-improved version). But I tend not to keep such games installed on my computer simply because I don’t want to get sucked into a game that keeps me from getting other things done.

This is also one of the reasons why I gave up on MMORPGs as well. (The other reasons include the tendency of most on-line communications to devolve to the level of a 13-year-old male who thinks that illiterate scatological spewing is the height of eloquence, and the lack of a sufficiently interesting end-game; on the latter, see the NYT article above). I prefer games that I can readily pick up and readily put down again; I rarely have time for anything else. Speaking of which…. ..bruce..

…here’s a website devoted to ways to destroy the earth. As the web creator notes, it’s not quite as easy as you might think:

All the explosives mankind has ever created, nuclear or non-, gathered together and detonated simultaneously, would make a significant crater and wreck the planet’s ecosystem, but barely scratch the surface of the planet. There is evidence that in the past, asteroids have hit the Earth with the explosive yield of five billion Hiroshima bombs - and such evidence is difficult to find.

..bruce..

As some of you know, I was a computer game designer some 20+ years ago, and I maintain an interest in computer games. Lately, I’ve been buying most of my games from Manifesto Games, a computer game distributor with a business model geared towards inexpensive (and downloadable) games from independent game companies.

Well, my latest purchase is a little gem called “FastCrawl“. The game is summed up by its title, which comes from an old D&D term, dungeon crawl. You take a randomly-generated band through a dungeon, battling monsters and scooping up ever more powerful weapons and armor. The “fast” part? You can play a complete game in under 30 minutes.

Rather than follow the chase after ever-more realistic (and complex) graphics and gameplay of most current computer role-playing games (RPGs), FastCrawl looks and plays more like the computerized version of a clever boardgame.

This, in my opinion, is a good thing. The game is fast, well-balanced, and varies just enough to keep things interesting. FastCrawl runs within its own regular window on your desktop, so you can (ahem) close it quickly if you need to. All games controls are via the mouse. In starting a new game, you can select the length (short, medium, long) and the difficulty (easy, normal, difficult, fiendish, insane). The game also has built-in help and a tutorial. You don’t even have to worry about character generation or game economics; your adventuring band is randomly generated for you, and there’s no gold, silver, treasure or stores in the game. And the game is turn-based, so you can hide the window from your boss pause the game for as long as you like and then come back to it later.

You don’t need a high-end graphics card, gigs of disk space and RAM, or an expensive strategy guide. You just need a computer with Windows XP and the Microsoft .NET 1.1 (or later) framework installed (a free download from Microsoft).

FastCrawl was developed by two guys, Glen Pawley and Alan Cachia, who live, of all places, on the island of Malta. It’s already won at least one “RPG of the Year” award. You can download a free, fully-functional 60-minute demo version from the Manifesto Games or the PawleyScape web sites. The cost is only $19.95 for the game itself.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. ..bruce..