I started
carpooling with someone. Boon Tea lives in Ryland Glen and also works
at Oracle's Redwood Shores campus (in the 300 building). Boon is from
Malaysia where he still has family. He's been working at Oracle for
five years and is currently in the Order Management product group
working with PL/SQL. He has a wife and this is their first house. He
likes to race remote control cars. He worries about all the Oracle
outsourcing to the India Development Center and is worried about job
security. Nice guy, fairly moderate accent, is a bit scared when I'm
driving.
Today Simon told me that the project I'm working on has the be redone.
Apparently our one customer doesn't want to have a new server
(Click-to-Dial is built on top of the new Media Access Server which is
only in 11.5.10). They want something that will run on Oracle iAS
(Internet Application Server). It's not that bad since I've been
procrastinating a lot and hadn't gotten nearly as much done as I should
have, although what I have gotten done is infrastructure stuff that
will be totally scrapped. C'est la vie.
I'm really thinking of playing Diplomacy (online). Read the rules, been
looking through BOUNCED
(Basic Online Utility for Network Computerized Electronic Diplomacy)
which has really nice looking maps of current and ended Diplomacy
games. Have started reading the materials on The Diplomatic Pouch which is a
bit too 'Zine-y but still informative. I'll probably wait for the next
RPGnet game to start in 6 months or so and by then I'll probably have
forgotten about it.
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Diplomacy is a
simple game with a whole lot of human interaction. A classic wargame
stressing politics and winning. I do get a feeling that if I play
really hardcore I'll hate it because you have to do too much
backstabbing and you get betrayed. The whole point of the game is that
you have to know when to burn your bridges and go for the win and that
may be too serious for me.
The only problem I see with BOUNCED is the stress on anonymity. You
don't know who the other players are, nor are you to either reveal your
identity nor try to find out someone else's identity. The theory is
that each game is a blank slate and it helps eliminate meta-gaming,
where you start gaming based on what you know of people before the
start of the game. I on the other hand think that that kind of
meta-gaming is perfectly fine. Acting on what happened in previous
games is a good way to stop hardcore gamers who make the game less fun.
But that's just my opinion.
This being the beginning of the month I've gone and spent most of my
monthly budget. Bid on a bunch of stuff in eBay (for older stuff) and
bought some stuff from online game stores. I'm thinking that someday I
may have to put a harder cap limit on my discretionary budget. Setting
it at a $1000 a month helps since I used to spend more and it's still
high enough that I don't feel like I'm starving for new things. But
it's also money that I'm not saving. It's not the grown up thing to do
and eventually I'm going to grow up some more.
Writing of which, Robert Wang is going to try to set me up with his
cousin in Australia. I guess we'll see if this works out any better
than the last girl. Hopefully I've learned some things and will do this
email relationship better.
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