New from Kelvin Crime…

ARRHYTHMIA
A fragrance to make your heart skip a beat

Well, a small degree of uncertainty has been lifted from the saga that is the pending closing of our call center. It’s still being closed, but I found an emergency exit.

They’ve opened 50-odd positions with customer service, and while many people in our office are not trying to move over, there are some that are — myself included (I can’t afford to be out of work, and I especially can’t afford to lose our health insurance).

Yesterday I took the qualifying test to see if… well… I qualified for the position.

I did.

There’s still a structured interview to get through, but I think that will go just fine. Training for the new job would start sometime in January, and the new job comes with a very nice pay increase.

There is still some uncertainty, of course. It looks like the sale of Verizon’s land line service in northern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont) is going to go through, and it’s safe to say that a lot of folks are nervous about what this means for us, the employees — Fairpoint is required to honor Verizon’s current contract with the IBEW and CWA, but that contract expires in August of ’08 — less than a year off — and there is a lot of talk that Fairpoint will go to the negotiating table with the intent of cutting as much as they can from the next contract.

Much of this talk, to be honest, is coming from the union. While I don’t doubt that Fairpoint would try and negotiate the best deal possible for them, the rhetoric being presented to the employees by the union is heavily influenced by their agenda (because they have one, and it isn’t always ‘putting the workers first’). Scare tactics, while the reasoning behind them may have some merit, do not impress me.

I guess that I find life itself to be uncertain, and I have never harbored the idea of working for a company for 40 years and retiring with a pension (or something). I’ve held a bunch of different jobs over the past dozen years, and I’ve always approached it with the thought, “This is what I have now, it might be gone tomorrow.”

Certainly, it’s a bit tougher now, with a family to look after and bills to pay (gone are the days when I could be out of work for a couple of weeks and be fine), but worrying about something I have no control over… it doesn’t do anything but drain energy and focus from what I can control — getting up, going to work, and doing my job to the best of my ability.

I’d like to keep my job (and benefits), but if I don’t… well that would suck, but we would figure something out.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I have been working on an Excel-based spreadsheet for creation and tracking of Earthdawn characters.

After some tinkering, I have a new version (v2.1) available for download. This version corrects a number of problems that were in the previous version. This version also includes the long-planned User’s Guide with information about the sheet, and some guidelines on how you might modify it for your own use.

You can download it here. (275kb zip) The full-size spreadsheet is 1.03 Mb. Any comments or questions, please feel free to e-mail me.

I spent my November working on an article for RedBrick, looking at the Step System for Earthdawn and running a break-down analysis of the different parts of it.

This is an analysis that I originally did years ago, but I hadn’t ever put it into a coherent, well-written essay before (with accompanying graphs, because we all know graphs are cool).

You can find the full article at the Earthdawn website.

PS — RedBrick’s latest Earthdawn release, the adventure Burning Desires is available in electronic format from RPGNow and DriveThruRPG. The print edition should be available early next year.

Stranger Things

If you like the trailer, be sure to visit StrangerThings.tv.

UnitedHollywood.com

Look at that! More than one update this month!

I’ve had an Excel spreadsheet that allowed the creation and tracking of characters for a few years now. The original sheet was developed for use with First Edition, and I did some debugging and data entry to add in material from some of the sourcebooks and expansions FASA released. When Second Edition came out, I worked on a conversion for that.

I have been pecking away at a conversion for RedBrick Ltd’s edition for a number of months now, and have decided to make it available for download so I can get feedback and assistance in finding the last few errors and whatnot that are no doubt hidden away.

You can download the file here. It is a Zip file that contains the 1.2Mb Excel sheet. There isn’t a user’s guide for this yet (it’s on my to-do list), and there are a few features that don’t work quite right (the list of available knacks does strange things as you hide/unhide talents on the build page), and these are on the list for debugging (if somebody can figure out a fix, let me know).

Any questions, comments, or feedback, let me know.

Just a quick update before I head off to bed. RedBrick Ltd has been posting a series of Writer’s Spolights, an interview (of sorts) that highlights the people who work on the Earthdawn game. Mine was recently posted, and you can read it here.

I’ll try to have more updates soon, but I’ve been really busy with work and everything. Until next update!

Or at least, that’s what it feels like. Our entire office (about 60 people) is on forced 6-day work weeks. On top of that, we’re often looking for incidental overtime (15 minutes here, 30 minutes there). All in all, it results in a bunch of frayed nerves, shorter tempers, and fatigue-driven slips.

What I do isn’t really a difficult job, but it is constant, and can be stressful at times. While the majority of our calls are straightforward, and those customers are satisfied with our service, there are those who don’t understand what we do, how we do it, or the technological and regulatory limitations involved. These are the customers that drive us crazy, and that power the frustrated ventings during breaks and lunches.

NaNoWriMo starts in a couple of hours, and I’m not taking part this year. My overtime heavy work schedule, coupled with a 7-month old daughter (who is doing great, by the way), and commitments to Earthdawn development mean it isn’t in the cards.

I am using the month as an opportunity to refocus and rededicate. I hope to update my blog a bit more regularly than I have been, and get some writing and/or editing done for Earthdawn (next up, a series of articles looking at the Step system and the probabilities involved). Stay tuned, and hopefully there will be more to see here over the next few weeks!

Hello. The summer “reruns” are winding down, and the new fall shows are being trotted out by the networks over the next couple of weeks. Not only is Heroes returning for its second season, it is part of what looks to be a truly geekalicious Monday night on NBC.

The summer saw some interesting shows as well. Most notable was Burn Notice on USA, which turned out a lot better than I expected. I’d capsule it as a cross between The A-Team and MacGyver — the lead character is a former intelligence agent who discovers that a “Burn Notice” has been issued for him. This means that his contacts ad support are dried up — no expense account, no official backing, and no life to speak of. He gets dumped in Miami and begins tracking down the reason the Notice was issued — taking freelance Private Eye-type jobs to make money in the meantime.

The writing on the show is pretty good, but it’s really the cast that made this show shine. Wonderful performances abound, including a great turn from Bruce Campbell (the reason I tuned into the show in the first place) as a former Navy SEAL, now more concerned with maintaining a posh lifestyle financed by his lady friend.

No doubt USA will be rebroadcasting the shows at some point in the future (they have confirmed a second season for next summer), and a DVD set is probably in the offering as well. Give it a look — it’s worth the time (and at only 12 episodes for season one, not a huge investment of time).

Anyhow, look to this blog over the next couple of weeks for impressions of other shows (new and returning) as I catch them. I’m looking forward to seeing what the networks do with all the genre shows they’re putting out there, and I’m interested in seeing how many last through the year.

That’s all for now!