Need to make a change I can embrace

I did manage two hours' sleep shortly after my last post, and felt surprisingly awake on Saturday. The Beatles cover concert wasn't bad at all. OK, the band (who we could hardly see because there was a tree in the way) seemed to lack energy at times, but heck it was free. The audience was younger than I expected, but when you think about it the weather was excellent, it didn't cost anything, and most importantly you could bring as much alcohol as you wanted. They finished with Hey Jude which I think would be my favourite Beatles song.

On Sunday I caught up with a woman from the autism group. We had a coffee and a long chat. Unusually for someone at the group, she's in a long-term relationship. When I talked about work she knew exactly where I was coming from (and that's unusual anywhere). She's had serious problems with depression and is on the maximum dose of Efexor and that's not all. She's also carrying a lot of excess weight. In fact her dream is to design clothes, that aren't tents and don't cost a fortune, for larger women.

Monday was a very fine day and after work I sat out on the waterfront. Two stingrays swam by, one of which was practically man-sized. It was an amazing sight; the last time I saw anything like that was at Kelly Tarlton's a long time ago. I then attended the first autism group of the year. I mentioned work, of course, and got all kinds of job ideas from bars to libraries.

Looking back over work-related blog posts from 2009 and 2012 (it's amazing how much I've forgotten), my latest experience is giving me a real sense of déjà vu. I absolutely have to leave the world of big faceless insurance companies, or else it'll be déjà vu all over again in my next job. It never ceases to amaze me that some of my colleagues don't just tolerate the environment, where everything you do is monitored at all times, they seem to enjoy it. I can sort of understand it with the younger ones, for whom privacy is a foreign concept (and I think you're naturally more competitive at that age), but when people get into their forties and fifties and are still driven by targets and KPIs that have been foisted upon them by some authority figure, I'm completely baffled.
On Thursday the global CEO sent us all a 32-meg email, which was nice because we have a whopping 150 meg of storage and can't send anything over three meg ourselves. The email outlined a three-point plan for us all to follow. First, put our customers at the centre of everything. Fair enough. Second, adapt to change faster. Embrace change. That's always a tough one for me. The last one though was like someone had Googled "corporate bullshit" and tried to cram as many buzzwords in one sentence as possible; I had no idea what it meant.
I am looking for jobs now but it's very hard to know what I should be applying for.

It's been a very hot Australian Open so far. Inhumanely so. It's not fun for anyone. The extreme heat policy doesn't really work, and I wonder whether it'll take loss of life for them to change anything. The temperature has since plummeted but it's pretty muggy out there now. It's interesting listening to the commentators. Today they were talking about the demise of serve-and-volley. In 2001 Roger Federer beat Pete Sampras at Wimbledon (7-5 in the fifth set - I remember it) by coming in on almost every serve, and of course Sampras did the same. Now they're saying racket technology would make that style of play almost impossible, which is a shame. The tournament website has something called Slam Tracker, an analysis section run by IBM. You click on a match and it brings up three options. One of the options is entitled "momentum" and it's almost totally meaningless. A much better idea would be to show the estimated probability of a player winning the match given the current situation. It would be easy to understand and show the relative importance of each point, which I think people would find interesting. The second option is called "social sentiment" and shows a graph of the number of positive tweets each player has received. My first thought to that is, who cares? My second thought is, how do they know? Do they search for key words in tweets so they can tell whether they're positive or negative? What if you describe a player as "amazingly crap"? It's all a mystery to me - I wouldn't know a hashtag if it walloped me on the nose. The third option just shows the stats, and that's the only bit worth looking at.

15UP - yes it's the one I invented

Wordament

People aren't buying the app, and that's hardly surprising because there isn't much to entice people to buy. There's so much you could do to make it really good, but the current developers aren't capable of making the (extensive) necessary changes. It's frustrating when you see what other apps have done. I was recently introduced to Wordament, a Boggle-style game involving a 4x4 grid of letters. You have to connect the letters together (diagonally is OK) to make as many words as you can in two minutes, but that's most definitely not all. Everybody plays the same game at the same time, and at the end of the game you can see how you stack up against the rest of the world. The games aren't all a simple find-as-many-words-as-you-can: sometimes there are themes or multiple letters on one space or some other variation, and that all adds considerable variety. The hardest variant is the one where you get a hefty bonus for making a certain long word, which is difficult to find when you're trying to make other words as well. My only gripe would be the arbitrary distinction between "common" and "obscure" words: some of the "common" words (which can give you more points) actually seem quite obscure, and vice-versa. Because I don't have a Facebook presence or an iPhone, I can only play as a guest, but that's fine by me. I'd give Wordament 4 stars.

The beginning of the end (again)

It's well after 4am and I haven't slept a wink, so I might as well write something here. I had my performance review with my boss yesterday (I think I have to call it yesterday now) which was even uglier than I expected. I really took a hammering. My input two months ago probably didn't help. I think it's fair to say that the writing's on the wall; the clock is most definitely ticking. I won't be fired, not yet anyway, but life will gradually be made harder for me over the coming weeks (and months, if I get that far) until either I'm managed out or I'm so depressed that I won't manage at all. Of course my performance is no worse than it was a year ago, and if it wasn't for the regime change I probably would have been fine. So the big question is, while I've still got a job, what do I look for now? I'm not going anywhere near life insurance again, that's for sure. And I need to get flatmates. Plural.

I found an excellent article about depression and work here.

I emailed the link to the app around the office on Monday. Most people would have ignored or deleted it, but my boss installed it! She got through the first six levels impressively quickly, then went back to level 287 (or whatever) of Candy Crush. Releasing an app on the market should feel like a big achievement, but it really just feels like I've hobbled over the start line of a marathon.

There's a Beatles tribute band playing tomorrow night, um, tonight, at the Botanic Gardens. I'll be going there with Martin, and yawning through the whole thing no doubt.

(I had another "Beginning of the end" in 2009.)

The luck factor

I've just got back from playing El Grande, a medieval Spain-themed board game, with Tracy and Tom. A very good game it is too. It's just about simple enough for me to understand (some of these modern games are too damn complicated for my liking) but it has multiple layers of strategy. It's dice-free and (on the face of it) almost luck-free, but as I actually won, luck must play a significant part. It took us two hours to play- if we were more experienced it would have been more like 90 minutes, which I think is just about the perfect length for a game. There was some faux-Spanish spoken, such as Tom's "el sixo" for a score of six.

Last Wednesday I attended the games evening at the library. It was nice to be in my comfort zone, playing games I'd actually heard of. I played Scrabble with one of the staff who organised the evening, and a guy from the autism group who talked almost constantly throughout. (It's amazing how many people I know who are capable of incessant talking.) I won by a decent margin despite being hampered by an unusable Q. I then played crib with that librarian - I happened to win by just one point in a dramatic finish.

Julie is someone else who can talk non-stop. She builds an impenetrable wall of words; every now and then I'll interject with "hmmm" or "that's right" and that's as far as I'll get. She'll get upset if I try to end the "conversation" which is usually a very negative monologue. Frankly Julie is a "time sink" I'd be better off without, even if (in her better moods) she can be understanding of my own problems.

Tom came over yesterday. He's got this amazing self-built briefcase computer. I wanted to take a photo of it and post it on here, but I could see he didn't like it when I pointed a camera in the general direction of the machine. Its innards include hard drives with huge capacities; it's got a screen on the outside and various protruding sockets. He transferred a bunch of comedy TV shows onto my laptop which was nice, but it took three hours, meaning he was here longer than I'd have liked. He gave me some handy pointers for my app though. I've been having all kinds of problems with it - everything that I could possibly think of has gone wrong, as well as many things I never would have thought of. I was over the moon this weekend when I received a much improved new version from the developers; up until then the problems seemed almost insurmountable.

At the weekend I heard a Scots College student (name Sebastian Hallum Clarke, born 14/7/97) talk on the radio about his success with apps. Later Kim Hill interviewed Eleanor Catton, 28-year-old author of an epic novel which has been nominated for this year's Booker Prize. In both instances you could see what a difference your upbringing (i.e. luck) makes.

This puzzle app is a lifeline to me. My chances of going anywhere in my current role are zero. Going anywhere good at least. My boss has sadly just been made redundant, meaning I'll soon have my fifth boss, and first female boss, in my time at the company. I don't think she'll be anything like as personable as my current manager. It's hard not to feel slightly edgy about it all.

Yesterday Tom told me that he went cold turkey on Efexor from a fairly high dose, with little in the way of an adverse reaction. He said Efexor numbed everything, as it has done for me. He now takes no antidepressants at all.

So Rubert Mugabe won the latest election in Zimbabwe by a landslide. Amazingly turnout for the election was 135%.

My brother had some drama at Christchurch when they tried to hit him with excess baggage charges running into the thousands. He should be back in the UK now, although I haven't heard from him.

App games: it's time I got a life

I've recently dipped my toe into the vast sea of app games, really to get ideas for my own app game, the first (non-live) version of which should be in my hands in a few days. I downloaded four free games and I thought I'd give a review of them here.

Candy Crush Saga

This game has overtaken Angry Birds as the world's most popular app game. I can see why: it's fast-paced and busy, constantly bombarding the user with animations and sounds. It took me a few minutes to twig what you were supposed to do, probably because I'm a bit thick. The object is to swap adjacent pieces of candy to create lines of three identical candies. The first couple of levels are very easy so that you're hooked in at an early stage, and this game has more hooks than a coat rack. There's a ticking clock in the background (What's this for? Is there a time limit?). It turns out that every half-hour you play, you gain an extra life. You can also buy extra lives or gain them by sharing your score with your Facebook friends, if you have any, and of course many people have hundreds of them. The colour scheme and candy-store theme are quite feminine; attracting that half of the population has played a big part in the game's success I think. As for me, well I completed about ten levels, hardly scratching the surface of the "saga", then promptly uninstalled the game (it's nice that it's so easy to rid yourself of apps if you've had enough of them). I quickly tired of the booming voice telling me something was "sweet!" or "tasty!" every few seconds. All the colours were over the top, and when I saw coloured fish crawling over my screen accompanied by fairground music, I wondered if someone had spiked my tea. And my lack of a Facebook presence renders the game unworkable for me. I won't give it a star rating: Candy Crush is very cleverly designed but it ain't for me.


4 Pics 1 Word

This is a puzzle game, each puzzle consisting of four pictures which combine to give a single word. Beneath the pictures are some letters which you use to form the answer - this can be anywhere from three to eight letters. My cousin and her family have played this a lot; it makes a very good family game. Some of the puzzles could be solved by quite small children and would provide a useful, fun tool for helping kids with spelling and vocabulary, while others would probably need grown-up eyes and brains. Difficulty varies a lot from one puzzle to another but it isn't in any sort of progression: puzzle 173 might be harder than puzzle 456. That's not such a bad thing; it doesn't lock out the younger family members after a certain point by producing a stream of hard-to-get words. And there are a lot of puzzles. I visited my cousin's place last night and there was a real sense of anticipation as we homed in on the 1000th (and supposedly final) puzzle. What would happen after completing the last puzzle? A big fanfare? Something asking you to shell out money for more puzzles? What actually happened was puzzle 1001. Everything is very clean and slick, with just the right amount of sound and animation. Sure, the pop-up ads on the free version get annoying, but I can't blame the designers for wanting to make money. My only criticism would be the choice of letters which you pick from. The unused letters seem to be picked at random from the alphabet; this means the low-frequency letters appear more often than they "should". Sometimes you'll even get a selection containing say three Q's and no U, in which case you can disregard the Q's immediately. That's really just a minor nitpick - I'm happy to give 4 Pics 1 Word 4½ stars.

Gyro
Quite a simple game which had me hooked from the start.
There's a wheel split into three coloured segments in the centre of the screen; using the touch-screen you rotate the wheel to catch coloured flying balls by matching them with the correctly-coloured segment. As you might imagine, the balls get faster as the game progresses. The more consecutive balls you match correctly, the points value of each subsequent ball increases, and it does so in quite an ingenious way. However if you mismatch a ball, the "energy level" of one of the three sectors reduces, as does the points value when you next catch a ball. When the energy level of any of the sectors reaches zero it's game over. Some of the balls have special powers, for instance one type of ball creates drones (they're all the rage these days) which ward off rogue balls. The worst ball to collect thankfully occurs only rarely: it reverses the rotation of the wheel, leading (for me at least) to certain death. The game has many subtle but rather cool features. The balls leave a trail as they streak across the "sky"; if you mismatch a ball the handset vibrates; as you approach your personal best a circle appears showing whatever username you picked for yourself, closing in on the magic colour wheel until your record is broken. I love the spacey feel of the game, the simple colours and the choice of font. As your high score climbs ever higher, you move up a ranking system. My last attempt, which was a huge improvement over my previous best, only elevated me to the third of 13 possible ranks. I haven't played since, but as each game only lasts a few minutes I may well do so again without feeling especially guilty. All in all Gyro is a suberb game: 5 stars.

7x7
As the name suggests, this game takes the form of a 7x7 grid. The object is to rearrange coloured squares around the grid to create lines of four (or more) of the same colour in a row, which then disappears. It starts off nice and easy, but rapidly becomes very difficult. And that, to my mind, is the biggest flaw of 7x7. However, the game is an interesting mix of skill and luck - there's a lot of strategy involved in deciding where to move each square to maximise your chances of still being able to move on future turns. You can see what colours are coming up next, and that makes strategy considerations even more involved. Odds come into play, as do other poker-like concepts such as inside and open-ended straight draws. If you do clever stuff like make two lines in one go, you get extra "lifelines" which are crucial in being able to survive later on, but you can only really collect these lifelines in the earliest levels and I don't like that your survival (or not) of level four is so dependent on what you did in level one. There are other things that could have helped make the game more marketable. It's too static; it needs a few more lights and sounds. Someone wisely pointed out that the "try again" button implies failure, and "play again" would have been better. And perhaps most importantly, the name could be more appropriate. It's true that the game is played on a 7x7 grid, but that's really only incidental. Four is the key number, not seven, so if the name is to contain a number at all it should be four. Still, I can't be too critical. Creating a fully functional phone app isn't easy, and it's kept me occupied for a few hours already. I'll give it 3 stars.