Starcraft 2 and Infested Blizzard

Like a lot of old school gamers, I’ve been eagerly following news pertaining to Blizzard (now Activision-Blizzard) and Starcraft 2.  My background as a gamer has dovetailed with my business degree to give me some seriously conflicting opinions on this subject, as well as a lot of others.  I have an additional conflict of interest here as a stockholder in the company.

So when I learned last week that the decision had been made to cut LAN play from Starcraft 2 entirely (steering players to Battle.net), my immediate response of righteous indignation was tempered by the knowledge that as a publicly traded company, the entire management and design team from Bobby Kotick on down is responsible to the shareholders.  The era of goodies like “spawning,” the feature of the original Starcraft title that allowed you to install versions of the game on your friends’ computers which could only be used for multiplayer with the original version, is over.  While those little features contributed to Starcraft’s success as one of the most popular PC titles ever, the brand and the company have such recognition now that the features are not as necessary.  People will buy the game; they don’t need to try it for free, so there is no reason for a for-profit company to offer it that way in any way, shape or form.

I’ll buy the game, and I’m glad that the management is watching the bottom line on my (and their own) behalf.  However, I’m sad as a gamer that new IPs are few and far between, and that something of Activision-Blizzard’s respect for the gamers themselves is drying up as the company churns out disk after useless disk in their Guitar Hero franchise, and publicizes its disdain for IPs that can’t be serialized and milked for a decade rather than letting great stories end honorably and well.

Lowering the Drinking Age

A collection of university presidents and chancellors are publicly calling for their states to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18. This has met with a tremendous backlash from groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and support from the interwebz (as evidenced by the comments that readers have posted on most of the news articles I’ve read). Unfortunately, those of us who actually like the idea of a change in the status quo don’t have a highly experienced and well-known special-interest group like MADD to churn out sound bites, so all the good quotes and publicity are against the change. I have to comment.

MADD is dodging their responsibilities and flirting with hypocrisy.

If you believe that people between the ages of 18 and 21 should be prohibited from purchasing and consuming alcoholic beverages, you need to have spent the last twenty years tirelessly campaigning against their being able to do other dangerous things or make other potentially life-changing or damaging decisions. To achieve continuity and avoid hypocrisy, you need to stand against the right of 18-year-olds to join the military to fight and die for their country, the right to purchase cigarettes (which more addictive than alcohol and actually shorten their users’ life expectancy) and the right to own and carry firearms. You need to crusade against 18-year-olds’ ability to enter legally binding contracts and financial obligations. And you’d damn well better argue against them being able to alter the course of our country by voting.

As a country, we the taxpayers and voters long ago decided that 18 was the age at which individuals have sufficient good judgment to make these kinds of life-changing decisions. There is no philosophically or morally viable reason that a right should be denied to an 18-year-old adult, but permitted to a 21-year-old adult, unless that right requires additional maturity to use effectively. I challenge anyone to argue that gun ownership, military service or voting require less maturity than responsible alcohol consumption.

And I do believe that within a few years of lowering the drinking age to 18, 18- to 20-year-old drinkers would be behaving responsibly in quantifiable ways.

During the years leading up to age 18, parents educate their children (most often by example) and prepare them to make the choices they’ll be faced with as adults – all of the choices I listed above. One huge reason for the preponderance of irresponsible drinking in college is that during the few years before age 21, parents are more distant voices in their children’s lives, and their children are far from their example. Also, as adults, college students are becoming more likely to make their own decisions, or to be influenced by their friends rather than by their parents. MADD calls the Amethyst Initiative an attempt by the University faculty to dodge responsibility. In reality, the responsibility to teach people to enjoy alcohol like an adult rests on their parents’ own shoulders.

HP Pavilion Notebook Graphics

HP publicly announced late last month that some of their notebooks had shipped with bad graphics chips. They’ve known this for about nine months now and have had an extended warranty in place at least since April, when I received a critical update e-mail.

The reason I write about this now is because I own an HP Pavilion dv2025nr – one of the laptops with a faulty chip. The dv2000 series generally uses the GeForce Go 6150, which is basically a slight step up from AMD-based integrated graphics. BIOS options let you assign 32 to 128 MB of the computer’s DDR2 RAM to graphics. It’s noticeably slower than the discrete graphics cards like the GeForce 8***M series, which currently ship in most of HP and Dell’s entertainment notebooks, and far less powerful, but it was sufficient to play c.2001 games like Deus Ex, Warcraft III and Diablo 2 at a decent framerate after I upgraded to 2GB of RAM. It even played World of Warcraft with all the graphics set to low and all of the notebook’s bloatware removed.

The bad chips basically cause a malfunction where if you turn on your computer, the LED Quicklaunch buttons light up, the drive starts to spin, you can hear the fan, but the screen stays dark. It seemed to happen more often when the laptop was hot, and less often after I’d let it cool down.

So I sent the notebook back under the extended warranty, which was fast and convenient. Received it less than a week later (they’d said seven to ten business days, so that was cool). Started it up. The screen started up perfectly, which was cool. But when the boot sequence was completed, the graphics were terrible – like 1987 terrible. My Nintendo Entertainment System had better color than this. Settings were locked on 800 by 600, 4-bit color. I tried downloading new drivers – sp33547 and sp 33549 (these are published by HP). No luck. Got on HP chat support and installed again, plus tried two of NVidia’s Forceware drivers – 169.21 and 175.19. Still no luck. Updated the BIOS to F.39 and THEN updated the drivers to sp33549, and still no luck. Now I get to send it back.

Will update when it returns.

UPDATE: I figured out that after installing the new drivers, rather than using Display Properties to try to change the settings, I had to go into the NVidia control panel.  Once I did that, it popped into perfect color and focus.  The dv2025nr is still not suitable to any 3D games released after about 2001, but it can play PC ports of original XBox and PS2 games, and classics like Warcraft 3.

New England Weather

Having lived in Boston for nearly two years now, I definitely consider myself a permanent resident.  I can give directions to tourists, use the T to its maximum efficiency, analyze the impact of the Red Sox schedule on my weekend plans, etc.

I am still astounded at how the weather can go from “Perfect Beach Day” to “Rain on a Biblical Scale.”

Today, it took about fifteen minutes.  And by the time 4:30 rolled around, driving was a matter of fording a series of large, shallow lakes while trying to see through the barrel of water that the jackass in the lane next to you kicked up onto your windshield.

In other news, I’m settling well into the new job.  I fell behind on my CFA studying over the past week or two (double whammy; the mental exhaustion of learning a new job and a new corporate culture, and the siren’s call of Half Life 2 on the new PC).  I’m starting to catch up.  The test is in December and I won’t be in panic mode for a few more months, but the more I can internalize now, the easier it will go.  From what I hear, Level 1 is actually not tremendously difficult for somebody who’s made it through a decent MBA program and puts in the study time – Levels 2 and 3 really separate the men from the boys.  I have some time for those, since I can’t be a true CFA charterholder until I have four years of experience with investments and securities under my belt.  Basically, I’m taking this test because it’s fun to learn about financial concepts, and because it’s a boost on the resume.

Also, the Bell in Hand is an excellent bar.  I have no idea what band was playing there last night, but they covered some good songs, and they put on a good show.

Building the PC

I recently wrote about ordering the parts for my new PC. I received all the hardware and put it together yesterday afternoon. Haven’t flipped the switch yet because I’m going to pick up an OEM copy of Vista from my friend for far less money than I would have had to shell out if I’d bought it retail, and that’s worth waiting an extra day.

Some thoughts:

The Thermaltake M9 1000 w/ side window is not only a nice case in terms of looks and sturdiness, but it makes for an easy build. First, the tool-less installation of 5.25″ devices like the DVD and Blu-Ray drive was very easy; I didn’t have to mess around with a bunch of screws. The 3.5″ SD card reader was a little more difficult to install because it needed to go into a cage-like 5.25″ enclosure, which required screws and didn’t interface well with the tool-less design, but using a few screws here was a small price to pay for the otherwise incredibly fast build. Speaking of the tool-less design, my 5.25″ devices feel secure and adding more would be easy if desired. It’s difficult to describe the fasteners, but suffice it to say that each 5.25″ bay requires only one, and it takes about two seconds to position and fasten it.

Second, the removable HDD cage. This thing makes me want to wax rhapsodic. The other times in my life when I’ve built a computer or opened up a case, I’ve had to plan very carefully what to do and when to do it, because a lot of things connect near the middle and bottom of an ATX motherboard – SATA, PCI and PCIe cards, USB connectors, jumper pins, LED plugs, all kinds of crap. If I screwed something up, I was doomed to fiddle around with needlenose pliers and a flashlight for up to an hour because there isn’t enough room in your average tower case to get a hand in there and still be able to see. With the M9, the HDD cage (with attached forward-facing fan) is held in place by three more of the tool-less fasteners that I mentioned above. Removing those lets you slide the cage right out the front of the case, then reach in there to manipulate plugs, jumpers or components. I didn’t even have to unplug the HDD to do it.

Regarding the rest of the build:

The OCZ 2×2 GB of DDR2-6400 went in with no problems. The motherboard had two yellow and two black memory slots, and the instructions said to use the two yellow ones first. No worries. I am aware that a 32-bit OS will not recognize more than 3 GB of RAM, but I may upgrade to a 64-bit OS at some point, and $80 for even 3 GB OCZ at 800 MHz was a pretty good deal. Plus I don’t have to mix and match sets of RAM sticks, which has a slight correlation with memory errors.

I installed the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro fan just like in the instructions, with the fan side facing towards the front of the PC so it blows air towards the back. Incidentally, the M9 case has a fan which will help carry the hot air out of the case. The fan is completely enormous; much larger than the stock fan that came with the E8400 CPU, and side-facing rather than top-facing.

The XFX Geforce 9800GTX is, indeed, a huge card. It isn’t quite large enough to require drastic modification of the case (i.e. using a hacksaw to cut out chunks of it), but it is large enough that the bottom 5.25″ bay of the M9 case is not really conveniently accessible. I don’t foresee this being a problem; right now I’m using three of the six 5.25″ bays and I doubt I will ever need them all. However, hooking up another one for SLI will be somewhat difficult because it will require a lot of messing around with the HDD cage and the SATA connections. Bottom line, in terms of form factor, you can definitely fit an XFX GeForce 9800GTX into a Thermaltake M9 1000 case unless you plan on having six 5.25″ devices, and in that case you’re probably nuts.

I will hit the power button for the first time tonight (after I get the OS), and will likely have to spend a few hours or days downloading new drivers and resolving hiccups. Part of the fun.

Offer Letter and PC System Building

Two awesome things happened today. The first and most important one is that I got an offer letter for a Financial Analyst position at the NPO that I talked about a few days ago. The offer looks good and while there is a part of me that wants to negotiate on the salary or the benefits, the overall package is probably 25%-30% better than I was expecting to make as a 24-year-old MBA holder in summer 2008. I will take it and be generally delighted.

This also furthers my career goals toward corporate financial analysis. While it takes me further from the equity research side, that doesn’t bother me all that much. For 99.9% of people, there is a threshold of wealth that they will never pass over without sacrificing their happiness and personal life. The other 0.1% are the empire builders who also have/had fantastic luck; who have had the opportunities and the personal drive to make it to the top of the pyramid and who have enjoyed the process. I may make this happen at some point, but in the meantime I’ll be pretty happy to simply do budgeting and financial analysis for non-profit organizations like hospitals, colleges, etc. that have missions that I can believe in. I’ll make enough money to be happy and prudently invest a portion of my earnings so I can build a safety cushion, and maybe one day I’ll call up some of the badasses I’ve met over the years to start a new company.

The other cool thing that happened is that I finally bought a new PC – or rather, the components which I will use to build a new PC. I used Newegg for most of the parts (about $750 worth, basically everything except for the CPU, the case and the monitor) and Micro Center for the rest of it (about $500 worth). After I get all the mail-in rebates fulfilled it should come to about $1250.

Here’s the build:

BLU-RAY ROM LITE-ON|DH-4O1S-08 4X R – Blu-Ray and DVD drive at $139.99
SPK LOGITECH|S-220 2.1 980-000023 – 2.1 Speaker System at $20.99
CPU COOLER|ARCTIC P4|ACFZ7-PRO R – CPU Fan at $31.99
HD 640G|WD 7K 16M WD6400AAKS – Western Digital 3.0GB/sec 7200 RPM HD, 640 GB at $89.99
MB ASUS P5Q PRO 775 P45 RT – Motherboard, 2x PCIe 2.0 and 2 PCI slots, socket 775 at $149.99
VGA XFX PVT98FYDF9 GF9800GTX 512M R – Video Card at $189.99
CARD READER ROSEWILL|RCR-102 RTL – flash memory card reader, internal (3.5″ drive) at $14.99
MEM 2Gx2|GSK F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ R – 4 GB of G.Skill DDR2 at 800 MHz at $79.99
IPSG Intel® Boxed Core 2 Duo Processor E8400 – CPU at $159.99
Acer America Corporation AL2216Wbd 22″ Widescreen Digital/Analog LCD at $239.99
Thermaltake USA Inc M9 ATX Gaming Mid Tower at $79.99
Antec Truepower 650W ATX Power Supply at $60 (from a friend)

I’m not exactly an enthusiast – these parts are chosen mainly because they uniformly have good ratings and are top sellers, and I’ve done the research to make sure there aren’t any reported compatibility issues. Their comment history in Newegg (which is a great example of a Sales 2.0 business model) is almost uniformly good, with negative comments generally attributable to things like overclocking performance or just a rare bad part. I have no plans to OC anything; just being able to play Blu-Ray movies as well current and future games at medium settings will be delightful after making do with a laptop with a 14″ screen and integrated graphics for two years.

So there it is – a new job and my present to myself.

Sailing Clinic Part 1 – Speed and Tacking

This is a continuation and expansion of my earlier post on sailing lessons, so I can get things straight and get ready to take a solo exam at some point in the next few weeks. If you’re not interested, skip it.

I’m still not going to expound on the rigging or anything; that’s information that’s easily found on other sites and it’s not that interesting. The boat is a Mercury, maybe 14 feet long, with a nice deep centerboard which is awesome for letting the boat lean really far over when you have a lot of speed, and really horrible when you’re sailing in a low-tide situation with lots of sandbars. In low wind conditions, it helps to have a jib or jibsheet up, which is a smaller sail in front of the mast that basically exists to direct more apparent wind at the mainsheet, and to catch wind when you’re running (sailing directly before the wind). For all examples, assume that the wind is blowing due north, and there is no jib.

As a side note, that word “jib” rhymes with “rib” and has no relationship with the verb “to jibe” or “to gybe.” That word rhymes with “imbibe” and means to change course across the wind’s heading while moving downwind.

So. Principle 1 is that speed equals control. This is because maneuvering requires use of the rudder, and the rudder changes your course by directing the flow of the water to one side or another. If you’re not moving, the water isn’t flowing, so the only maneuvering ability you have involves “swimming” or “sculling” with the rudder…basically, you move the rudder like a fish’s tail to get some slight forward momentum. Your sail controls your speed and attitude (how far over your boat leans), and your rudder controls your course. Evolutions like docking, where you may not have the luxury of moving with the wind, generally require a lot of well-managed momentum so you don’t end up facing straight into the wind with no speed (this point of sail is called “in irons”).

Principle 2 is that speed, in and of itself, is not always the most important thing. Generally when you’re sailing you’re trying to go somewhere, and that somewhere may not have anything to do with where the wind is blowing that day. You want speed, but you want to be moving towards where you need to go. Sailing races require a lot of instinct and calculation for figuring out how to get the most “velocity made good,” i.e. to choose the most efficient way of getting to the end point. If this point is straight upwind, you’re going to have to do a lot of “tacking” – moving in a zig-zag pattern, across the direction of the wind.

So remember that the wind is blowing north. We want to move south. We can find an efficient point of sail by setting a southwest course, at a “close haul” – that is, with your sail kept at very tiny angle relative to your boat’s keel (the line between the front and the back) – and then performing a tack.

The first thing you do when you tack is to make sure that you have enough speed and (obviously) you’re not in danger of hitting anything, and that your sail is, indeed, fairly close to the keel and under control. Then you slam the rudder all the way over in order to turn as fast as possible. Your course should pass through the direction of the wind at the same time as your boom (the big heavy thing with the sail’s foot attached to it that makes an L-shape with the mast) swings over to the other side of the boat.

Here’s the tricky thing – there are two separate things that you need to concentrate on. First, you (and anyone else) need to be very conscious about how your weight is distributed. Since you’re in control, you must be on the opposite side of the boat from the sail, so you need to quickly move to the other side of the boat and switch which of your hands are holding the tiller/rudder and the line that controls the sail. If you do not move to the opposite side from where the sail is, in a strong wind the boat may capsize. The weight of you, your passengers or crew, and your cargo works to counterbalance the force that wind exerts on your sail and hence your boat. If you believe you are going over, ease your sail so that less of it is exposed to the wind. You will sacrifice speed and control, but it’s better than unexpectedly going swimming.

(Because of its deep centerboard, the Mercury can heel over incredibly far – about 60 degrees – and remain stable. I am told that you can sail a Mercury with perfect stability even while it’s heeled so far over that water is coming in over the leeward (downwind) side. Ask around or do some research to determine how far over your boat can lean while retaining stability, and practice because your weight and how you manage your weight in the boat make a huge difference. I have to remind myself of this stuff whenever I go sailing, since my first boats were canoes and kayaks, and if you’re leaned over more than about 30 degrees in one of those boats you are boned.)

Second, straighten out your rudder just as you and the boom switch sides. This prevents you from oversteering and simply heading straight back 180 degrees from where you were going before. If this maneuver was performed correctly, you should now be at about a 90 degree angle from where you were before, or heading approximately southeast, still at a close haul but on the opposite side. You can do this as many times as you like in order to “beat” upwind, but remember to get up enough speed each time that you can complete the tack.

This concludes the introductory sailing lesson on speed and tacking. Next (i.e. whenever I feel like it), jibing and points of sail.

Once More Into the Breach

I’m preparing for an interview this afternoon for a nonprofit company here in Boston, and really looking forward to it. The opening is for a Financial Analyst with a hefty load of budgeting analysis responsibilities, and assistance with providing information for financial reporting. I’d report directly to the CFO. Hopefully I’d be able to get occasional exposure to the board of the directors, because it has some pretty impressive resumes attached to it. In general I’m looking forward to the interview and I really want the job.

The opportunity came through a placement agency, and I was able to get some good information regarding what they’re looking for and how to tailor the way I present myself. I have a good due diligence package including a financial summary for the company, a LinkedIn dossier of the CFO (since I’ll be meeting with him in a few hours), and a detailed version of the job posting. The salary looks pretty good, and this job definitely fits within my career plan. Getting some good corporate financial analysis and budgeting experience would put me onto the CFO or Controller path ten or fifteen years down the road.

Thinking positive thoughts now.

Prospects

I have an interview set for Monday for a financial analyst role at a nonprofit organization. I’m doing serious research in preparation for the interview, because this would be a really excellent job to cut my teeth on in the finance industry. Budgeting, forecasting, research and general corporate finance. Interestingly, this opportunity came through a placement agency, which is excellent because it makes my due diligence easier and because it gives me an edge when compared with random external applicants.

Here I will digress into communication theory. First off, if a decision is important (buying a car, choosing an apartment, hiring for a position), advice that comes from a person with whom the decision-maker has a pre-existing relationship is generally given a lot of credit. Second – relating to the placebo effect – people tend to value things that they pay for more than things that are cheap or free.

However, I still have to ace the interview.  Which means brushing up on my corporate finance and my advanced Excel.  I’ll probably create a few pivot tables and VLookup cells just to stay up to date; it’s been a few months since the last time I used either feature.  I’d like to know whether the company uses Office 2003 or Office 2007, but that isn’t something that the placement agency is likely to know.  I’ll create a folder of documents on the CFO, the company, and anyone else I’m likely to run into (LinkedIn is great for that).  I’ll plan my route there and back to avoid the possibility of being late. Shine my shoes. All that fun stuff.

I also have an analyst position at a downtown firm on the back burner, but they’ve taken three months, two interviews, two phone conversations and innumerable e-mails, and I still haven’t gotten a direct answer. So at this point I’m proceeding under the assumption that the answer is no, and if I’m surprised, that will be excellent. It costs nothing to follow up anyway.

The Upside of Recruiters

I’m a big believer in recruiters and placement agencies, but only the good ones. A bad recruiter will find out your name, company and contact info; then spam you with phone calls and e-mails about opportunities. He is attempting to flip you – to turn a fee by getting you into a new position for his benefit, not for yours. The ideal situation for this recruiter would be if you took the new position and stayed there for a year. At that point you could expect more “opportunities,” and ideally you would make another move. In this way, the recruiter would make an easy $3,000-$9,000 off of you on an annual basis. Even if his agency takes a 50% cut, with thirty of these ideal candidates on his list, this recruiter will make more than $80k per year. That’s until word gets around that he’s shady and recruits from his clients. Generally they try not to do that (or are contractually bound to avoid it), but it happens.

Good recruiters operate on two levels. First, they keep a list of active and passive candidates, most of whom are (ideally) currently employed. They keep track of their candidates’ skills, abilities, desired positions and workplace environment preferences. If you’ve spent time in food service, developing and maintaining this database is the staffing equivalent of side work – chopping lemons for hot tea, preparing table settings, etc. It’s the stuff that doesn’t directly generate revenue, but makes your job run far more smoothly when things get hot.

Then they have clients and openings. These are the firms that have positions that need filling, and the people at those firms who liaise with the recruiter and communicate about those opportunities. Good recruiters will post these positions on job boards, both internal and external, and at the same time start thinking about who on their list would be interested. Then they start calling their candidates – the ones who have expressed a desire to move on, or who would be making a substantial jump in salary or prestige or general fit.

Good recruiters earn their fees by taking all the expensive, time-consuming, pain-in-the-butt aspects of staffing – getting a bunch of resumes, conducting initial screening to make sure that applicants actually have the skills they say they do, doing the actual interviewing, running background and credit checks on the short list of applicants – streamlining them, and just presenting a handful of really decent prospects to their client companies, who can then take their pick.

This is excellent for both the candidate (who doesn’t have to actively job hunt, or at least spend as much effort doing so, and who can use the recruiter as a source of information) and the clients (who don’t have to have their HR people waste a month filling each open position and who generally enjoy a higher success rate with their new hires, if the recruiter is good). And that is why the clients are willing to pay the recruiters a fee, generally 4% to 10% of a new hire’s annual salary, spread out over six months or a year to minimize the risk of the hire not working out.

Incidentally, this gives the recruiter an incentive to negotiate a higher salary for you and to be relatively up-front about it.

If you find a good recruiter, keep him or her in your business card binder, and send an e-mail once or twice a year with a few words on how you’re doing in your position. Because if you do, then the recruiter will keep an eye out for openings that move you upward in terms of salary, or fit, or prestige, and e-mail you if they come up. He (or she) will not waste your time with repeated phone calls or e-mails, and will respect your “no.” Like a good salesperson, a good recruiter makes a living by creating deals that benefit everyone involved – himself, the client and the candidate.