Archive for July, 2010
Top 10 ways you know you married a fanboy
With the release of Starcraft II, my husband’s semi-latent fanboy roared back into the picture. I survived him playing the Beta and I’ll survive the final 
release, but if I had any doubt about his fanboy status, it’s all been laid to rest.
Top Ten Ways You Know You Married a Starcraft Fanboy
1. He pre-orders the Collector’s Edition for himself and the regular edition for you (even though your computer isn’t quite up to snuff) because he wants you to experience his joy.
2. He wakes early on release day and hovers over the online delivery notification briefly freaking out when the package is classified as undeliverable for 15 minutes.
3. He liberates the delivery from the office before you get home, before eating lunch, and well before anything else.
4. Your mid-day IM is interrupted with “OH MY GOD THE INTRO. CANNOT TALK” and he stops talking. Completely.
5. Your typical late afternoon mushy phone call is greeted with “Can’t talk. Saving settlers!”
6. When you offer to take him out to grab dinner, he responds with, “But honey, I have to save the train. The train is being robbed. Don’t you understand? THE TRAIN IS BEING ROBBED.”
7. He starts telling you all about the life of his new friend Jim Raynor, while you’re lying in bed. (He also carries around his dog tags.)
8. He tells you that he’s been waiting nearly half his life for this – and he’s actually telling the truth.
9. While his friends jump in to beat the game in Hard Mode, he finishes the campaign on Normal because he actually cares about the storyline.
10. He manages to jam as much SC2 as possible into the 2.5 day period between Release Day and leaving for the internet-free family reunion not just because it’s new, shiny, and the best thing since… well, since the original, but also because he refuses to play offline and miss getting credit for in-game achievements.
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I can’t say that I understand it. I haven’t ever really excitedly anticipated the release of anything like this. Yes, I went out at 3 am to get my iPhone 3G, but his glee is far beyond that. While I can’t necessarily relate, it is fun to watch how giddy he’s been. In the right circumstances, we’re all just overgrown kids after all. I still jump in puddles, run around the house with my cat, and splash in the tub. He just happens to be a Blizzard fanboy. I’m just fine with that.
I love you, ya big kid.
Wedding thoughts
Our wedding went by in a flash. I remember talking to my brother and sister-in-law before hand and they kept telling us that we wouldn’t remember most of the
little things that were worrying me. I felt confident that if I had everything covered and in the hands of our wedding coordinator, we’d be able to happily enjoy the day.
We did enjoy the wedding, very much, but they were right, the whole thing was a blur. When Ashley, our photographer, sent me the link to our slide show and pictures online, it felt like I was really getting to see the day – all the little things and people that I’d missed. So much happens, 
it’s just not possible to take it all in regardless of how much planning and delegation you do. I didn’t see his face as I was walking down the aisle (because I was trying not to be eaten by the lawn). I didn’t see the guys getting ready or the guests arriving, but the camera (and Ashley) did. She did an amazing job capturing beautiful images that convey the feel of the day itself and the people with whom we shared it. It’s exactly what we wanted.
Why all the confusion about Facebook’s brand tanking?
I find it perplexing that there’s so much discussion and confusion about Facebook having brand issues. More than a few good thinkers are asking why users would be so dissatisfied. Honestly, I would have been shocked if Facebook had performed any better than they did.
Facebook has repeatedly committed the cardinal sin of showing what comes across as callous disregard for their userbase. Loyal users are a sensitive, fickle bunch. Above all things, they don’t like change or the feeling their patronage and loyalty are being taken for granted.
Between significant improvements to the user interface, repeated changes to privacy settings, and ongoing shifts in how advertising was treated, Facebook has riled the core userbase mostly without apology. Instead of providing a safe, secure, predictable internet home away from home, Facebook has given its users innovation and improvements. For newer users, the changes have been fantastic. Let’s face it. Facebook’s old UI was horrible. Good business decisions? Probably, but for user relations, you’re better off slowly boiling the water.
For users with more longevity, it’s the same as trying to swap out a child’s security blanket. For those users, it becomes all the more frustrating because they’re essentially trapped. They can’t go anywhere else even though they’re unhappy and now, they don’t trust Facebook as far as they could throw the server farm.
Facebook isn’t the first site to face unhappy users and it won’t be the last. Time will tell if Facebook’s choices to make changes despite their users will be a wise or foolish decision. For now, they have some brand repairing to do. In the meantime, they’ll have to be content with “popular, but disliked” and hope no one invents a better mousetrap in the interim.
Cooking is an art
Posted by Tammy in miscellaneous & sundry on July 15, 2010
I’ve spent the past few hours unpacking wedding presents, including putting together and filling a new spice rack. It has the usual culprits: cinnamon, garlic salt, oregano, parsley, mustard seed… I have used mustard seed exactly zero times in my life, but, for some reason, it always shows up. I blame the Bible.
So, in honor of the new spice rack, I started thinking (inspired further, of course, by GraphJam):
If my life depended on identifying spices I own by taste, I’d die. I can identify some by smell (maybe). I couldn’t describe them to you or actually tell you what they do or rather, are supposed to do to food, “Salt good. Too much pepper bad. Garlic good. Too much salt bad.”
Some spices I started using because I stumbled on them in a recipe who knows when for who knows what. Other spices, I use out of habit, such as always putting oregano, parsley, basil, and garlic in spaghetti sauce. I learned it that way and it works. I’ve never questioned it.
Some spices in my cupboard are a mystery. Turmeric. What’s it do? It turns things yellow. What’s it taste like? It turns things yellow. It goes in curries. Curries are often yellow.
Yes, I’m acknowledging my ignorance. The sad thing is I really do like to cook and I like to imagine that I know what I’m doing sometimes. I think I’ll spend some time with my cookbooks and hold off on the trips to Penzey’s for six different kinds of pepper until I get my bearings.
Thoughts on privacy (or the lack thereof)
Between Zuckerberg’s proclamations, data-mining, mobile tracking, and all the other ways our lives
are exposed, every day someone is echoing the sentiment that privacy is dead. I agree that the degree to which we’re able to keep information of any sort truly private is eroding; I don’t agree that privacy is dead. What’s dead is our ability to take privacy for granted.
Privacy has moved from being a passive, expected state of things to the active, ongoing maintenance and protection of personal information where the onus falls on each individual. Facebook’s constantly fluctuating privacy settings are a fine example. Protecting any information you may deem personal requires repeatedly interacting with the site’s ever-changing “new and improved” settings. At this point, information privacy on Facebook can be maintained only through vigilance.
Blizzard’s recent experience with Real ID reinforced that anonymity we may take for granted can end at any time. We’re left with a choice. We can take the time to pay attention to the activities of companies with whom we share personal information or we can just go along for the inevitable ride. The companies we trust today may, in an effort to “be social,” either inadvertently or intentionally expose information we prefer kept out of the public eye. Those changes can occur at any time with or without full disclosure. It’s a risk we take on a daily basis and one we should contemplate every time we choose to register with a site.
With each new interaction, we risk our identities, interests, relationships, and any other information we’ve chosen to share being exposed to the world-at-large. In reality, while we should think twice before we share information, we often don’t. At some point, we’ve all registered somewhere we probably shouldn’t have or shared information that, on second thought, we wish we hadn’t. We can’t take those decisions back. Once the information is out there, we no longer have control of it. It no longer belongs to us as much as we may wish to make it so.
The bottom line is that you need to share information wisely and if you have reason to be concerned about what might pop up, remember that online reputation management isn’t just for corporations. Change privacy settings, delete accounts, request information be removed, and do whatever else you need to do to maintain the reputation you want online. The days of thoughtlessly and anonymously bounding across the internet are long since gone, if they ever existed at all. If you don’t want someone to know what you’re doing, don’t do it – whether you’re online or offline.
Follow-up to the Blizzard Real ID situation
After a somewhat disastrous few days of PR, Blizzard announced that they would not be requiring real names be used on the forum. As I mentioned in my post earlier this week, I felt the move to real names in the forum was an unwise idea. Blizzard’s decision to listen to their users and use a different approach to address the forum problems was a smart move. It showed that they do, in fact, listen to their users when push comes to shove. While some users feel like Blizzard’s move was merely a hollow victory given some of the other ongoing issues (e.g. EULA complaints), I’m hoping that this is a continuance of their social technologies learning curve.
Why I think Blizzard Got it Wrong
I have a confession. I game and I don’t play just any games. I play World of Warcraft, but I don’t just casually play, I raid. I dedicate a portion of each week to cooperatively kill vicious pixels with 24 other people. I admittedly don’t do the killing. I’m a healer and I am, in fact, our raid’s healing lead. I virtually manage a team of 5 – 6 other people to keep the raid alive. I’m also pretty good at it.
People who know me well already know that I play. It inevitably comes up since it’s actually how I met my husband. “Hi, my name is Tammy and I met my husband in an MMORPG.” I started playing a few years ago and I enjoy it immensely. I find it rewarding, in the virtual and accomplishment sense, and I’ve obviously formed some solid and lasting relationships through the experience.
Gaming and World of Warcraft (WoW) in particular have a bad rap with a lot of folks. The games and the people are stereotyped and misunderstood to the point that some employers may decide to not hire someone based on the simple fact that the individual plays WoW. I’ve generally been cautious about how and when I discuss my hobby as the misinformation is rampant (until today, I suppose, but this is my blog so I’m allowed some leeway).
So during the day, I’m a mild mannered employee of a health insurance company who specializes in all things social and internet-y. At night, I’m an extremely tall, lavender goat from space. Don’t judge me. Most of the time, I spend my days educating people about and evangelizing social tools, including the privacy implications. I am deeply invested in my work and I’m a firm believer that social technologies will continue to change how we live our lives. Given that I spent seven years of my life getting a doctorate in Clinical Psychology, it’s fair to assume that I pay attention to such things. It’s also safe to assume that since I work in healthcare and with social media, I am very sensitive to how personal information is managed.
I am extremely protective of my personal information. I am one of the relatively small percentage of people who took full advantage of Facebook’s privacy features. I care about who sees my information and how they see it. I want to have as much control over my information as possible. Only within the past year have I begun using my full name online as it is part of my professional identity.
A month ago, Blizzard (the WoW folks) introduced Real ID. The system allows players to communicate across all of Blizzard’s gaming universes by implementing a single “real” user ID for each player. The system was presented as opt-in and was seemingly designed to connect the users’s real life identities similar to Facebook. The move streamlined player communications and allowed friendships to expand beyond a single game.
This week, Blizzard announced their intention to implement Real ID in the World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo forums. Soon, commenters will be able to post only using their full first and last names as part of the Real ID system. Blizzard stated the change was being made to combat forum trolling and flamewars, which have been a recognized problem.
What happened next may have been a surprise to Blizzard, or perhaps not, but it was not a surprise to anyone familiar with social technologies, Facebook, or with any interest in online privacy issues. Players were outraged. While few argued with the legitimacy of Blizzard’s concerns about trolling, the proposed solution was onerous enough to result in 2000+ pages of player responses in the North American WoW forums alone, over 44,000 mostly angry or simply astounded comments.
While Blizzard points out that the exposure is opt-in, it is only a choice in the sense that a player may choose to post or not post in the forums. While forum posters are merely a subset of Blizzard’s users, they are a vocal, invested, and passionate subset. They are exactly the players that Blizzard cannot to afford to lose or alienate. The mystery here is that Blizzard did exactly that. So, the question is why would Blizzard take that risk or did they simply get it completely wrong? Read the rest of this entry »
Fireworks
We’re back from our wonderful honeymoon cruise to Alaska. For the 4th of July, we watched fireworks from the roof of the Science Museum of Minnesota. It was fantastic! Here’s some video of the display. I also posted some photos up on my Flickr account.
