Awesome and True Shark Science

I don't think I need to explain to anyone what Shark Week is; Discovery Channel's celebration of sharks is well known all around the world. But what some people, especially those who continue to tune in to it annually and enjoy it, might not realize is that in recent years Shark Week, much like the Discover Channel itself, has been getting a really bad rap amoung scientists and science educators for (what's a nice way to put this?) including content that ranges from somewhat misleading to pure fiction.

So, in an attempt to promote actual learning some of the leading science channels on Youtube are hosting their own Shark Week this year; you know, with facts and stuff. If you like sharks, I would highly recommend you watch these videos. Or just go to the whole playlist.

Revisiting 12 Things I Want For D&D Next

Back in January I made a list of a dozen things I was hoping to see in the new edition of D&D. With the Starter Set and Basic Rules already out I am doing a quick revisit to see which ones appear to be coming true.



1. That it won't be called D&D Next.
There still are some official sources referring to it as D&D Next, but in most places it is simply being called "Dungeons and Dragons". If there is no official name for this edition I guarantee that the de facto name amoung fans will be "5th edition"



2. That it won't be released until it is ready.
There has been nothing that has come out so far that looks remotely rushed, although the lack of fan fare on the Wizards website makes me think that they have been pulling staff from all over to get everything done on time. (both their online magazines stopped production for just this reason)



3. That there will be a return of the two version strategy.
This isn't happening in the way that I had hoped, but they are addressing the problem I was pointing to (the high cost for a group of total newbies). Between the Starter Set going for $19.99 and the Basic Rules being free, a group can play for an extended period of time with only having spent $19.99.

4. That there will be a return of the Monstrous Compendium. 
The monsters will be in a Monster Manual again, though I am still hoping for the high level of detail that made the Monstrous Compendium so great.



5. That there will be a return to mathematical elegance. 
There does seem to be slightly more elegance than 4th Edition, though it still falls short of 3rd. I will wait to see the core rulebooks before passing judgment on this.



6. That there will be a full suite of apps ready for launch day.
With the launch being spread out over five months,  it would be hard for me to judge this a failure if the apps come in before November; still, there haven't been any announcements about what apps are coming or when they will go live.



7.  Sort out the huge mess of legal rights surrounding Living Greyhawk.
There is no reason to think any progress has been made on this.



8. Make sure D&D Next can play well as low fantasy.
Everything that has come out so far screams low fantasy.



9. Put the dragons back in Dungeons and Dragons.
We probably won't know if this is true till the Monster Manual come out.



10. Make the game more dangerous.
Just looking at the rules it is easy to see the danger level has reverted to something more akin to 3E.



11. Make the PHB more than just a rule book.
In reality it is too soon to give this a pass, but based on what is contained in the Basic Rules and the Starter Set I am supremely hopeful. Especially the novel quotes sprinkled throughout the Basic Rules gives me a lot of hope that Wizards understands exactly what I was getting at.



12. Have a good index.
I am going to have to see the core rulebooks and actually use them for a while before I can call this one.

Unboxing D&D

So today was the official launch day of the D&D Starter Set and since I'm not well equipped to make an unboxing video, I thought I would make an unboxing picture gallery.

This is the front of the box.
The artwork looks great, and the logos look familiar despite
being new. Nice to see no sign of "D&D Next". Unfortunately
mine had a slight dent in the box, but it was the last one, and
I didn't want to go driving all around town.

This is the back of the box.
The text is clearly written for someone who has no idea
what D&D is, as it should be. The price of $23.99 is decent
for everything it contains, made possible in part by making
the Basic Rulebook a free download.

The lid is off.
The dice resting on top are of decent quality.

This is the rulebook.
It is 32 glossy pages.

This is the inside of the rulebook.
The artwork in it is beautiful, though there are many pages with none.

Under the rulebook is an adventure, it is 64 pages long.

Under the adventure are 5 pregenerated characters.
The clean layout seems to be representative of the edition as a whole.

An ad for Encouters on one side, a blank character sheet
on the other.

A spacer takes up the bottom half of the box.

The contents outside the box.

12 Years of Beating the Odds

Today, April 27 2014, is our 12th wedding anniversary. Even though I usually love coming with reasons a particular number is important, and twelve is an easy number to do this for (important to ancient cultures, smallest number with 6 divisors, lowest abundant number, its a sublime number, its a super factorial, and duodecimal is the basis for time), I have none the less found myself focused on a very different matter to do with our marriage in the past few weeks; how incredible it is that we have stay married for as long as we have because we have been and continue to be hugely at risk for divorce.

Here is a list of the risk factors we had before our marriage even started - things about our background that are known to greatly increase a couple's chances of divorce:

• Margaret is 5 years older than me (I suspect this causes marital problems because the wife starts running out of years she can have children before the husband wants them at all, which is exactly what happened in our marriage)
• Both of us come from families that got divorced.
• We have different religions. 
• We both suffer from depression.
• We lived together before marriage. (Admittedly we were engaged before we moved in together, but I've never seen anything that says this lowers the impact on divorce rate)
• We knew each other less than 2 years before marriage.

But in addition to our backgrounds, a lot of things have happened in our years married that are additional risk factors towards divorce including:

• We have been under constant financial stress for pretty much our entire marriage
• We have both had long bouts of instability in our employment
• We lost a child (particularly in the five years following the loss, this sends divorce rates through the roof)
• There has been constant tension between Margaret and her in-laws

For fun I ran through the questions on a divorce probability calculator and it told me this:

Sean your score is 82 which puts you in the Very Strong Probability category.

Very Strong Probability

The news is not good. You're amongst a demographic of people that have the lowest long term marriage success rate. What that means is that based on the factors that you indicated, there are many things in your life that significantly contribute to divorce and very few, if any, factors that contribute to a long term successful marriage.

So I guess we've been beating the odds, and continue to do so every day. I feel like in the last 6 months a lot of things in our lives have taken turns for the better; hopefully that will continue and all these risk factors will continue to be little more than curiosities.

On Birthday Wishes

I had a birthday just recently, a fact that will probably leave a couple of you wondering why Facebook didn't inform you of this.

Have you ever found a public domain picture, only to
wonder who is in it, and how they feel about the whole
world having permission to use it?

The first four birthdays I celebrated as a member of Facebook (2009-2012) I had my birthday set to hidden. This was a purposeful choice based off of privacy fears; that is to say you can have your identity stolen by a person who has nothing more than your name and birthday.

But although I felt like I was taking a stand on privacy, it seemed that no else I knew, including many very intelligent people, were similarly blocking their birthday. Every year I would watch friends get scores of birthday wishes, but then I would get just one from my wife and a couple more from people who saw my wife's post. Even though it was an absurd thought to have, it made me feel pretty worthless to seem to have only one person in the world who cared that it was my birthday.

Reluctantly, for my 2013 birthday, I decided to make my birthday public during March. I got a lot of birthday wishes on the big day, and for that day I felt really great; that day was one of the best things about an otherwise bad year.

But when the day was over I realized something, that now I would be socially obligated (or at least I would feel socially obligated) to send birthday greetings to others when their birthdays came up. In all the years I was hiding my birthday I didn't feel bad at all that I almost never wished anyone else a happy birthday; I might wish three or four people a year happy birthday and that would be it, and I quite liked it that way.

Unfortunately, old habits die hard, and I quickly fell back into my old ways of not posting birthday wishes to other people. So I decided that for 2014 I would go back to keeping my birthday private, lest I be an even worse person for not wishing others happy birthday.

Strangely, I don't feel so lonely this year, and I am actually quite happy that no one except Margaret wished me a happy birthday (also, please note I just said I am happy that no one wished me a happy birthday before you get any ideas about wishing a belated one).

Actually, in many ways I wish my birthday had passed by completely unobserved; its not that I dread getting older, its just that feel little need to celebrate it.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

So yesterday I started a new job; my fourth in the last 13th months (fifth if you count the part time job I have had concurrently with different full time jobs). With each new job I have taken up the keyboard and tried to express some optimism, and so I find myself doing that again today.

There certainly are some easily quantifiable aspects of my job with Envacon that make it superior to what has come before it. My annual salary is higher, if only marginally, than what I made at Entrec. I have a private office just like a did at Armour Clad (and while the new office is half the size, my office at Armour Clad was right by the bathroom, and the acoustics from there carried too well.) And while FA gave me good hardware, and Metal Fab gave me top end software, Envacon is the first to give me a high end computer plus all the software I need to actually get my job done.

But the thing is, I've done the "look at why this job is better than my last" rig-a-more-roll before. I argued for each of my jobs in 2013 that they were the job I have been waiting for, that I would like to work and stay at for years to come. Everyone of those predictions failed, so why wouldn't this one? A big part of what made those predictions failures is that they were predictions in the face of negative perceptions; I wanted to love the jobs I got, and so when I saw things that bothered me I buried those feeling deep, then would write the praises of the new job.

The day I arrived at Entrec they didn't have a desk for me; that problem would never be resolved. I worked in a small room with two other guys, and but for my boss and the IT manager I never even got a hello from another person in the building. I had a leery feeling about the place from day one, and it never went away. Because I didn't have my own desk I had my trainer sitting next to me watching and critiquing my ever click, and that is in the end what led to my being fired.

I praised Entrec for the money, the shorter commute, and how interesting the work sounded. Though the positives were never enough to balance the negatives, and I was doomed to lose that job

The day I met Ken, the owner of Armour Clad I felt he was someone I would have trouble working for; he was both an egomaniac and a micro-manager. I didn't like that he wanted me to take a big pay cut for the first 90 days I worked there, with the understanding he would bring my pay up at the end of the 90 days.

I praised Armour Clad for the giant private office they gave me, and for giving me a chance to be an estimator. However, I would learn fairly quickly that what I liked so much about estimating in school, is just a small part of what the job involves in real life, and I despise what estimating is really about. Its just as well Ken fired me, because I probably wouldn't have lasted much longer.

While I perhaps ignored some strong warning signs at Entrec and Armour Clad, I can probably forgive myself for not paying attention to the signs of trouble at Metal Fab. Metal Fab are a bunch of cheapskates. Just walking in the building last summer it was easy to see that the furniture was old and the building was ancient and in need of repairs. All over the building were signs of just how cheap the company was. Most obvious to me was that as a drafter I didn't get a real cube,  my monitors were rather small, my computer was very slow, and for one crucial piece of software we didn't have enough licenses.

I praised Metal Fab because it seemed like a good fit for my skills and everyone there was genuinely a pleasure to work with. But on day one I was bothered by the the company's unwillingness to invest in vital equipment; I should have guessed that would also mean that they would rather lay off skilled workers than pay them during a down turn.

And so that brings me back to my new company Envacon.

As of yesterday, this is my life.

Before I say anything else about them, I should explain how I got the position. A friend put me in touch with them just after they received notice from their Mech Tech that he would be leaving. I was told it was too soon for them to do an interview, but that they would love to have a short cup of coffee with me. A short coffee turned into a long coffee, turned into a tour of the facility and meeting the other owner. By the end of two hours they had all but told me I was going to be hired, and the next day they made it official.

I have had to fight tooth and nail for pretty much every job I've ever gotten. Not being much of a people person, I am lousy at networking, and so I have never been hired like this before. I can't tell you how good getting this job in this way made me feel; for once I feel like a company truly wants me rather than is merely settling on me.

The only reservations or bad feelings I have ever had about this job are that I have worried a little bit that I am in over my head (which they have done a wonderful job of lessening by making it clear that I will not be expect to learn things fast nor truly replace the eight year veteran whose job I am getting) and it has occurred to me that with the owners of the company being in their late 50s that they might just sell the company off when they reach a certain age.

So to end things on a high note, here's a quick list of all the awesome things about my new job

• Very short commute
• Job has a lot of variety
• Pay is the highest annual salary I've ever received (though lack of benefits lessens this)
• A lot of my previous skills are relevant to the job (even help desk)
• I will be learning a lot of new skills that are very marketable
• Job will help me get my CET and other certifications
• Private office, 2nd floor with nice view
• Bosses seem like two of the nicest bosses I have ever met