When your idea of a perfect day is a day with as little human interaction as possible, you tend not to leave home much. But on rare occasions, opportunities that are too good to pass up present themselves. Opportunities to experience things that just might make suffering through several hours with a crowd of people worthwhile. That's why I'm now in possession of this:

I had briefly considered buying all of the available tickets, just so I would be surrounded by empty seats, but I soon realized that would bankrupt me. Hopefully, the chance to hear this live will be worth it.

Because of the restructuring that's been going on at work recently, someone from patient accounts has been assigned to handle many of the billing tasks that used to be done by me and others in our department. I've been going down to her floor every so often during the past couple of months to train her. We'll call her "Betty".

Not too long ago the director of finance sent me an invite to another staff lunch. In the invite was a message explaining that Betty will be included as a "virtual member of the team". When I went to her office soon after that to give her some more training, it wasn't long before she started questioning me about this lunch invite. I explained that it was something that the finance director did every few months and immediately saw a look of horror appear on her face as she no doubt imagined a future filled with these lunches. I could see the fear in her eyes as she looked in to mine, pleading. "I don't want to go"

Of course, I completely understood her feelings. I sympathized with her, but I decided that brutal honesty was the best approach. "Betty…. No one who's invited to these things wants to go. But we have no choice. We just have to suck it up and suffer through it"

But my words had no effect as Betty quickly entered the stage of denial that I was all too familiar with. "I'm not going. I'm just going to have to take time off that day".

I hated to burst her bubble, but I had no choice. "That won't work. He'll just reschedule the lunch"

As I watched the hope drain from her face, I was reminded of how hard it was for me to accept when I was forced into my first staff lunch. It came as no surprise to me when Betty quickly entered the next stage of this painful process, anger. "But I don't want to go! Why can't he understand that?"

I decided to help her on the path to acceptance by offering a simple suggestion. "You could always call him up and explain that to him"

The long sigh she let out told me all I needed to know. Betty understood what a bad idea that was. But she refused to give in. "I'll have to think about this. There must be way out" were her last words before we moved back to her training. I was sure she would waste plenty of mental energy plotting and scheming before finally showing up for our lunch next week. I couldn't help but feel sorry for her.

Welcome to the team, Betty.

If you are one of a group of people to receive an email and you want only the person who sent it to you to receive your reply, you should hit the button marked "reply". If you want the entire group to get your reply you should hit the button marked "reply to all". I do not feel that this is an especially difficult concept to grasp.

Some people I work with might feel differently. There is one person in particular, who, when emailed along with a large number of managers with a request to provide information to those mangers, will consistently reply only to me with the information. I will then have to forward the email to all the people who actually needed it. It's gotten to the point where I have to end each email with "PLEASE HIT 'REPLY TO ALL' SO EVERYONE WILL GET YOUR RESPONSE". She'll still send it only to me. I swear, if she ever does hit "reply to all" I'll probably have a heart attack.

But I also have to deal with the opposite problem. Every so often some variation on the following email will go out to the entire agency:

I am pleased to announce that, effective immediately, Jane Doe has been promoted to the position of Chief Paper Pusher. After many years of service to this company, it seems Jane has finally been promoted to her level of incompetence. I look forward to many years of Jane coming up with dumb ideas, making unreasonable demands of her staff, and generally making our agency a worse place to work. Please join me in congratulating Jane on her new position.

I will then spend the rest of the day reading replies of "congrats, Jane!" or "This was well earned!"

Why am I being forced to read these things? They're not congratulating me! Does the entire agency really need to see all these emails of people kissing up to someone? Since the person they're congratulating is the only person who needs to read the damn email, why can't it be sent *just to her*?

Why?!

Fact!

;)

In the basement level of Wildwood, New Jersey's Boardwalk Mall there is a small arcade called "Remember When" where, for an hourly fee, you are allowed access to dozens of pre-80s pinball machines

It never ceases to amaze me how different pinball was back in the day. It's so much easier to loose your ball in every 60s and 70s pinball table I've ever played than it is in more recent tables. Points are harder to come by too. High scores are usually in the tens or hundreds of thousands instead of the hundred million or billion I see in so many tables from the 90s or 2000s.

The design of these old tables is much more focused on bumpers and holes than you see today. Just about every table I've played from the 90s on seems follow the same basic pattern of "left ramp, right ramp, and a group of three bumpers in the upper left", but there seemed to be more variety in pinball before I was born. I saw a baseball table with holes representing a single, double, triple, home run, and a out, with your score kept in runs instead of points. There was a horse racing table where different shots moved a different horse forward and you won if your horse made it to the finish line first. I can pick up the basics of most modern pinball tables fairly quickly, but the differences in many of those older games really kept me on my toes.

Unfortunately, before I could take a picture of those tables I noticed a sign prohibiting photographs, so I quickly hid my camera away. It was probably for the best, since that gave me more time for pinball. There were far more games than I could possibly play in the time I had. I hope to go back there someday.

I went to add a new game to my collection a few minutes ago and was amazed to discover that I wasn't forced to track that game as a consequence of me adding it. I've been complaining about that issue for what seemed like forever, so I thought I'd type up a quick blog congratulating Gamespot for finally fixing one of its glitches.

But after going to my page I notice something missing. None of my friend's blogs are showing up on the right side of my screen. I have to go to my "Friends" page and look them up individually, which is way more time consuming. I also notice that none of my friends have any of their friend's blogs visible either.

Seriously, Gamespot? I was so happy with you for about sixty seconds. Is there some sort of "minimal annoyance" rule on your site that mandates you to create another way of annoying me every time you fix one of your issues?

So... sorry if I don't read all your blogs as quickly as I had planned. Is everyone else having this problem?

dubel_07 has been pestering me for months to play Amnesia: The Dark Descent. After finally caving in and giving the game a try, I'm glad he was so persistent.

You start out in a gloomy castle with no idea how you got there. There's little light coming from windows or the occasional lit candle. As you explore you find some tinder boxes for lighting candles or fireplaces and, if you're really lucky, some oil to light a lamp you have with you. You need all the light you can get. There are weird shapes in the shadows, odd noises coming from each patch of darkness. Not only is this unsettling to the player, but it does bad things to your character as well. The more time you spend away from the light, the looser his grip on reality becomes. He'll start to tremble, noises will seem loader and more sinister, and he'll be harder to control. Spend enough time like this, and every source of illumination you find will become precious.

It's really hard to find another game that I've played to compare Amnesia to. The closest I can come up with is Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, but while that game was also great at messing with the player's head, it at least gave you the means to fight the enemies you met along the way. You don't have that luxury in Amnesia. There's a monster chasing you and there's nothing you can do about it. Stand up to the monster, let it get anywhere near you, and you're dead. Your only chance is to run like hell, hide in the darkness, and hope it doesn't find you. When you hear the monster coming, that same darkness that you spend the rest of the game avoiding becomes your friend. It's really clever game design, forcing you to sacrifice some of your sanity for survival. The monster is also scary as hell because you spend more time hearing it coming than you do seeing it. Spending more than a second staring at will almost always mean game over.

The game also draws you in by taking away your ability to save. It saves when it wants, or when you quit. With no quicksave option or in-game menus of any kind, there's nothing to take you out of an already absorbing game. There's also no way to create a save file before you peak around the next corner, further heightening the tension.

Amnesia retails for $20 US, and can often be had for less than that on download services like Steam. It runs great on my ancient PC. There's really no reason not to check out this one of a kind gaming experience.

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There is a middle aged man and a middle aged woman who usually take the same train that I do in the morning. They don't seem to know each other outside of the train, but they often engage in idle chit chat to pass the time. They talk about the weather, any big news that's going on at the moment, their children, that sort of thing. All pleasant, inoffensive stuff. But whenever they talk, I have to hear every damned word, since they insist on sitting 5 seats apart from each other. Why don't they sit next to each other if they're going to talk all the time?! I could never figure that out.

The guy must have had that thought too, because one day he invited the woman to sit next to him on the train. "No thanks", was her reply as she took her usual seat and THEN CONTINUED TO TALK TO HIM. WHAT THE HELL!??!

So I have to listen to these two yammer on every morning. It's a relief when the train finally arrives at my stop, but I can't get too relaxed. At least once a week, as I'm exiting my train, I must step around a river of coffee (if it's the morning train) or beer (if it's the evening train) so I need to be on my guard until I actually step through the doors. Because we all know that adults aren't capable of keeping liquids in their containers.

When I get out of the station the real fun starts. That's when I maneuver through the hordes of people that stand between me and my office building. New York really, really needs to designate some kind of "stop and text" zones for people who just aren't capable of ignoring their phone. And those zones can't be in the middle of the damn street. New York also needs to pass a law that says if you take longer than 30 seconds to line up a shot of whatever tall building you're trying to take a picture of, I have every right to shove you out of my way.

Then I finally get to my building and I have to join the mass of about 50 people that are waiting for an elevator that can comfortably fit 8. The feeling of euphoria I get when I finally manage to push my way out of that elevator is almost enough to make me forget that I'm now at work.

Being at my desk means I have a building around me that keeps New York's more annoying elements out. But it can't last forever. Eventually I've got to find something to eat. My usual tactic is to plan where I'm going to go ahead of time, get there quickly, eat as fast as possible, and rush back. Today there seemed to be more eurotrash in the streets than usual, so I was eager to see if I could break my own record of shortest amount of time walking through this vile city. I thought I was making pretty good time as I neared my building... but that's when I started hearing things.

"AAHHHHH!!!! F*** YOU!!!! AAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!"

There was a crazy person standing on the streets in front of the office doors, yelling and screaming at no one in particular. Like anyone who has spend a lot of time in the city I've learned how to deal with these nutjobs. Walk quickly past them and never, ever make eye contact. But that wasn't an option here. He was in my way. I had to wait several agonizing minutes for him to wander down the street and pester some other poor souls.

After that experience... and I hope you can appreciate the significance of these next words.... I was actually happy to be back at my desk. It wasn't until the trip home that I next had to step outside. I still have to deal with the same people on the way out of the city as I do coming in, but at least every step I take brings me further away from that awful place. I should use that time to relax and decompress, but instead I use it to prepare myself for the next day, which I'm sure will be just as bad. At least, I *was* sure until I stepped out onto the street in front of my building this evening and saw signs taped to every post and street lamp along the entire block warning "NO PARKING 5:30AM to 11PM 6/30/11" There's going to be a film crew in front of my building all f****** day.

Tomorrow will be even worse.

Our director of finance is my boss's boss. He often assigns tasks and projects to me, so I have pretty frequent contact with him. I recently got an email from him explaining that he has taken a leadership seminar and asking that I fill out an online survey about him so that he might "grow as a leader".

After asking around, I found out that other staff that he deals with on a regular basis got this same request. When I went to the website that hosts this survey I saw that the specific answers given by peers and direct reports would never be identified to the subject, so I decided to be brutally honest. The form contains several pages of "leadership skills" that you had to rate from 1 to 5. My ratings tended to be near the lower end of that scale. The last page contains two text section asking you to describe the subjects best and worst qualities. I took a long time with the "worst qualities" section and only stopped after I hit the character limit.

After saving my answers I found out that since I was not a peer or a direct report I would be classified as an "other". People classified as an other "may have their specific answers shared with the survey subject".

I am so screwed.

I finished Crysis 2 over the weekend. It's a damn good game.

I was reminded of my recent experience with Goldeneye through most of the campaign. Like that game, Crysis 2 gives you multiple paths to take through a level and several different ways to deal with enemies; go in guns blazing, wait until they're alone and silently take them out, or just avoid them. I really hope this is the start of trend with FPS games. Anything that will take the genre away from funnelling us through narrow corridors that lead to the next shooting gallery is more than welcome.

The other standout feature of Crysis 2 is the graphics. It may be the prettiest console game I've ever seen. The fact that the game can look so good while presenting us with large, open levels is really impressive.At times, New York city looks a little too good. Even with all the dust and rubble thanks to an alien invasion, the game world is still cleaner than real life New York. It's also missing all the gaudy billboards that infest the city,but I guess I shouldn't expect *too much* realism in a sci-fi game like this.There's still an impressive attention to detail in its depiction of New York city, especially in all the famous NY landmarks seen throughout the game.

I pass through Grand Central Terminal almost every day, and while the Grand Central in the game isn't 100% accurate, it's close enough to make the huge firefight that takes place in it really surreal for me. The game also loves to show you NY buildings collapsing during just about every level. That's… well… I'll just call it a bit awkward.

Again… it's a great game. Lots of mission variety, lots of ways to tackle most objectives, and it's also very long for a modern shooter. It took me at least 10 hours to finish my first playthrough, probably longer. Very commendable in this day and age. If you're looking for a quality shooter I can't recommend Crysis 2 highly enough.