stuff123

I hope it’s not yourself. You seem to be smarter than that.

Since they don’t respond to emails, this would be a good way to share some things I think are going on at Zynga right now. I spent a lot of years in sales and marketing and you can tell when a product has peaked in it’s life cycle and where others are under performing according to the bean counters in an organization.

Some of the recent changes in Mafia Wars are what I feel are only attempts at having more people playing the game at the same time. It might mean they added another server. I haven’t found any difference between fighting and that new money thing—racketeering.

They keep throwing more “exploding cannolies” at us with different versions of the promotional weapon that favour the individual that will dig into their cash stash and buy more godfather points. And magically all the mob size limitations have disappeared except for Boss Fights.

I see critical hits as a bit of a wildcard that favours the underdog in a fight which is a good minor adjustment.They made minor adjustments as to the amount of cash you can lose in a fight/racketeering thing.

To be honest I have been playing competitors games more recently because they have made them more playable and more interesting. So today I was able to buy 9 casinos, 1 luxury hotel, 1 tourist shop and a whole bunch of other things and still had $43,000,000 in the bank.

I’m only at level 90 and was hoping to share what happens when you hit 99. I’m not certain I will get there because I’m sure a lot of people at these levels are getting much enjoyment out of the game, just like me.

And Zynga is now promoting a number of games along the top line of your screen and promoting them as “Top Games”. I’ve seen this before in another business I was in. It was the list of poor performers and they were looking to increase the activity/sales in same. If we had access to their performance figures, I’m sure you would find these games low on the list. You might as well kill the Texas Hold’em game because the likesof Pokerstars, PartyPoker and FullTilt Poker have that dominated and do a very good job at it. They have much deeper pockets as well.

Zynga is far from being in any trouble, I would think. They dominate the market in Facebook games. Pirates and Football are growing I’m sure and some of the other games are doing adequately but Zynga is only bringing in stop gap measures. They may have things in the works but they aren’t sharing.

So Zynga, it’s time for the next generation of Mafia Wars. Mafia Wars 2 needs to be open ended and more of a changing challenge with movement to new locations and varying activities. Sound familiar. They know what I’m talking about.

They think that they have control over their market. I’m thinking the visits to the Ferrari dealership are less frequent now and they are listening to the bean counters too much. Never let the scorekeeper run the game and once they get control they will never give the ball back. It’s what has happened to every company throughout the world.

It’s time to be creative, new, original. Think outside the box not on the cash flow curve. If you don’t get something new happening soon, your customers will be on a new quest if you get my drift.

Nobody wants to see you fail. We just would like a new challenge, that’s all. You have pioneered the market in these games and you need to continue that.

This just happened to be the perfect way to help explain what I’d like to do with BozosBrigade, which is a small team of people formed to firstly play games and secondly to help me write some fun stories.

The games’ part makes it easier to research the game tips side of Stuff123, a blog I write about stuff (go figure). Things that happen in life as I see them. It’s so much easier to find out how the games work when you have enough people in your team/crew/horde/tribe.

Some are even actually communicating with me which is what I’m really hoping will result out of all the games—a kind of Internet family, if you will, doing what families do best—share. Buying 6 casinos at a time isn’t the best part. It’s the people in the team that I find more fun.

And I’d like to write stuff about that sharing experience. So this one is about fishing which was triggered by one of the newest members I recruited (I’ll explain the recruiting thing in a couple of other stories, later). Specifically, the news feed that you get on your home page about friends status.

MF : Learn from the past, Live for today and Look to the future..
JC :Nice
AJD: It sounds OK, but what if the fish aren’t biting?
MF: Crack a cold one, lay back and relax and wait, they’ll come back on the bite.. Thats what fishing is all about
AJD:At last! Some one who understands fishing!
me: Some people use dynamite. It’s quicker. They don’t understand that the fish isn’t the real prize.
JC: Poor fish

I chopped out all the timestamps and pictures and changed everybody’s name to initials only, because I do believe in people’s right to privacy, but they are sharing this stuff with me because they accepted me as a friend.

At least MW did, after I attacked her in Warlords (lol). She was good natured about it and I was “Spot on” about my gut feel regarding her personality and how interesting she must be.

You can tell a lot from a picture. Just ask the police investigators. They use Facebook a lot for the bad folks, so you might be more careful with who and what you post in pictures in the future. Not that your bad (lol).

If I feel a picture is in order for the story, I will always ask permission. I have a story right now in draft form that I though was real nice—family values. Had a number of pictures of members of BozosBrigade and nice families. I asked their permission and since it went 0 for 6 in the reply column, the story gets shelved or rewritten with no pictures or some other pictorial way to handle it.

I think I understand. They want to protect their family. I learned something about these people. The pictures didn’t lie. Family is very important to them.

OK. So here’s the fishing connection.

When I was a little “Bruce” my dad would take us fishing. It was a pretty long drive to take three kids on but we weren’t there to have fun. We were there as part of the crew to bring home the catch. My dad saw fishing only as a method to increase the family food supply. And I know why.

He came to Canada when he was 13 from Poland. He didn’t know anybody. He worked in logging camps and with dam building construction crews in the deep woods of northern Quebec. They used to throw a stick of dynamite into the nearby lake near the outhouse drain pipe. The fish would congregate there because minnows would be attracted by the stuff that went into the water and the food chain would be completed with a stick of dynamite that was intended for a pile of rocks for the dam. They had no choice. The grocery store was a long ways away.

So my dad never learned the joy of fishing. Sitting on a dock or in a boat watching the little critters nibbling at your worm. The sense of excitement when the bobber plunges beneath the surface. The pleasant aromas in the air. The sound of water lapping up against the boat, the dock, the rocks. The feeling of the boat rocking while you fall asleep that night in your bed. It takes hours for that joy to disappear. And you sleep like a baby.

I don’t fish anymore. I like to look at the little critters more now. But I think I might go out fishing again.

I might just leave the hook bare.

Yah. It does feel kinda’ good.

You see lol a lot on Facebook.

That’s why I like to visit it.

I haven’t been writing on today.com for long so they’re still seeing how this is gonna’ workout. But I did get some acknowledgement that Stuff123 has got promise because they said I could apply for a second blog. I gave them all kinds of grief in a bunch of emails asking what is that I have to do so you can up the ante. I just wanted some targets to work toward and I could measure if I was achieving those targets and adjust my strategy accordingly.

Well, for now, its the second blog. It is their playground so I have to play by their rules or otherwise they’ll take the ball and go home. So I named it Stuff456 in the application and it will use the same look and feel as Stuff123. Got approval really quickly on a Saturday, too.

There will be some repeating in the categories but I plan to add some different ones like KidsStuff and StuffWeGet among many, many others. So maybe there will be a Stuff789.

But here’s where the problem lies. I write the first post and since this is a new blog, there are no categories. So I go into edit categories and select add new and type the new category name and hit enter and this comes up.

Warning: Attempt to assign property of non-object in /import/data/mains/t/today.com/wpmu/wp-admin/includes/template.php on line 52

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /import/data/mains/t/today.com/wpmu/wp-admin/includes/template.php:52) in /import/data/mains/t/today.com/wpmu/wp-includes/classes.php on line 737

Who writes this stuff? Writing is about painting pictures with words. Use the wrong colours and all you do is create mud. This one is a landslide about to take over Peru.

It won’t go away because I don’t know how to make it go away. The software writers give you no understandable idea of what is going south. And they will argue sure it does, it’s write there in line 52 and line 737. Well guess what, I don’t have a line52 or a line 737 so I don’t know what the @#$% you are talking about. It will make you crazy.

The real lesson here is when you write anything make it so that even I can understand it. If you can write it in such a way that an 8 year old can understand it, then you have written something worthwhile. Otherwise, it’s just more stuff for the family pets to mess up.

So the email to customer support will be entitled “Help” and the content will be a link to this story.

I hate boxes. The corners make it so you can’t find a comfortable resting position and the the flaps are designed to keep you from going outside the space within.

I guess I’ll have to work on a workaround if it doesn’t get solved.

And the workaround is to copy the stories and paste them into the editor in Stuff123. It does result in the loss of the link to the original stories. They are in effect, brand new stories to the Internet. It is difficult for customer support to understand the problem because they are not sitting in front of your computer and seeing the problem. They see a different screen.

I think I caused the problem by deleting the initial story in the second blog and thus removed all categories. I will now advise them to delete Stuff456. I’m still scratching my head as to why it would be required with the approach I have taken to Stuff123.

So Stuff456 is dead after 4 days but lives on in Stuff123.

Google Translate is a prime example of things that are happening in the Internet that no one could have imagined in the design of the world wide website. I thought it was time that I investigated the story that I had heard somewhere, I don’t remember where, that the world wide web was the brain child of the U. S. military.

Like all stories that are told from one person to another, and then another, and then another, they end up being different than the original.

My first step in researching something is that I look it up in Wikipedia. The most amazing thing about this reference library is that the majority of its contents are written by contributors. It’s funded by donations, so when I make enough money from writing stories, I will make donations. (Writing’s not the best way to make a living, but it’s true reward isn’t monetary)

The short version is, according to Wiki, is that it was the brain child of a single individual,  English scientist Tim Berners-Lee, and the military connection has to to with funding from an arm of the U. S. military—DARPA. The stuff is waaaay to dry for me.

And to double check, I use About.com, as well. It wasn’t as dry and it supported the story that the web did have it’s roots in the U.S. military. (see TBL) It was first called ARPAnet until the hackers got hold of it and used the military computers for free.

Lesson learned. You can’t always believe what you read on the Internet and if they really want to get into your computer they can. Just don’t leave the valuable stuff out in the open to tempt them. That’s what passwords and encryption are for.

But back to Google Translate. In our little Internet community called BozosBrigade, I just recruited a new member who speaks Slovak and she accepted me as a friend. So I sent the usual welcome file and links that I now do for all new team members.

But I decided to try something because she might not speak English. I don’t speak a word of Slovak. So I get out Google Translate, set it to Slovak to English, and typed the following.

The translation comes back with:

Is it doing it correctly? You got me and I suspect it isn’t quite perfect. It’s a first attempt at something, and a good idea. If you happen to speak Slovak, please feel free to use the comments box and let us know how good or bad the translation turned out to be.

For all I know, the translation could be asking her about the price of eggs in the local grocery store. When she’s ready, she’ll let me know.

I’m no Tim Berners-Lee, but I’m trying something in the Internet to see if we can make the world a better place. You can play, too.

The content of the note is the Slovak translation and the title in the Facebook note is simply one word.

Hello

It all starts somewhere. It’s a lot harder to fight with friends than it is with people you don’t know.

Tucker is, as I found out from my new Aussie friend (MF), Aussie slang.

Here’s MF’s definition.

The search of tucker in the Aussie Slang Dictionary defines it as:

The thing I’ve learned here is that if you really want to know what an Aussie word means, go ask an Aussie. They will give you a better feel for what it means than a dictionary could ever do.

And then it dawned on me. I had to edit this post after “publishing it”. In North America, it was grub and a grub box—from the Old West. Same church, different pew. (banco di chiesa in Italian. It will make more sense when you read about Google Translate)

When I lived in Calgary, every July you could go to the Calgary Stampede and watch the chuckwagon races where they threw the symbolic tuckerbox into the back of the wagon along with symbolic tent poles. The statue and the races are a tribute to the folks that paved the way for us all.

MF explained it best, in true Aussie form, regarding the portrayal of Mick Dundee by Paul Hogan in the Crocodile Dundee series. It’s close but it’s missing something.

My interpretation of this subtle reply is it means that something gets lost in the translation. The movie is an American producers idea of what the U. S. movie goer would like to see. The movie creators first priority is to fill the seats in the theatre and they aren’t too concerned about “keeping it real”. “Close, but no cigar”

I’ve been experimenting recently with Google Translate. It’ still in beta mode. More new words. Beta just means that it’s still under construction and is in more of a test mode and not ready for full release. But you’re welcome to try it and they ask for your input on what can be made better.

It has a unique feature that the other translators don’t have. It will attempt to detect the language and it apologized for not supporting Norwegian yet. That stuff you see in Star Trek about universal translators is not just science-fiction. Google Translate is an example of the idea in diapers.

There’s still a best way to handle something when you don’t understand it’s meaning.

Just ask.

It gets it’s name from the two primary spices used which are chili powder and Italian spices (the blend you can buy at your local grocery store).

The Stuff

2 Boneless chicken breasts cut into small pieces
8 cups of water
3 tbsp. of instant chicken stock
1 ½ tsp. salt
½ cup uncooked rice
2 carrots
2 broccoli stems
1 tsp chili powder
2 tbsp. Italian spices
1 small can of tomato paste

What To Do

Cut the heads off the broccoli and serve as a side dish in you next meal.

Always peel carrots that you cook in crockpot recipes. For some reason, the peel will blacken in the slow cooking process. Trust me, it did for me in another recipe.

Cut the carrots and broccoli stems into long strips and then into small pieces. Cut the chicken breast into small pieces and put all the ingredients into the crockpot.

An easy way to get the last bits of tomato paste out of the can is to pour 1 or 2″ of boiling water into the can. Wear an oven mitt because the can will transfer the heat very quickly. Use a small fork or spoon to break the last bits away from the can and then just pour this part into the pot. You can also add additional vegetables if you need to use up some that are in the refrigerator that may soon be going bad. It would be a good soup to use brussel sprouts cut up into small pieces if they just happened to be on sale. They’re just small cabbages.

Cook for 6-8 hours on low.

I don’t get it.

I’m a Canadian and I am envious of two beautiful songs that our neighbours to the south have to celebrate their strong belief in their country. They are “America the Beautiful” and “The American National Anthem”. In my mind, two of the best inspirational songs ever written.

So it is Sunday and there are only two NFL games on today. They are the last chance before the biggest game in that sport—the Super Bowl. The NFC and AFC Championship games are the prize today.

And as usual, the game will not start until the singing of the standard song that sends the gladiators into the coliseum with the right motivation and stirs the fans into a frenzy—The American National Anthem.

I understand the first one. She doesn’t know any better because she was an American Idol contestant so it’s just another audition for her. But I don’t understand why Martina McBride feels the need to put all kinds of twists to the song.

She is a songbird. You don’t need to be doing any auditions for the audience. We would listen to you sing Mary Had A Little Lamb if you just did it the way it was intended. I went to The Favourite Reading Room in disgust.

It’s not the first time I’ve written about this (see Butchering the American National Anthem ). Maybe I’m making something out of nothing but I thought the song was important to the American people. I know The Smothers Brothers agree with me. And maybe that’s it. We’re older and remember when people placed value on things that are important.

Maybe that’s what is wrong with today’s world economy. Nobody really cares anymore? I sure hope not.

Boof, the co-writer

Listen…

Autumns twilight hour with rain gently falling down,
You feel the soft light feathered touch as the drops caress the ground.

We know our mothers crying are they tears of joy or pain,
The way that we are treating her just fills me with disdain.

Her name is mother earth and she’s given life to man,
But when she finally tires of us we’ll have nowhere left to stand.

All living creatures gently held within her tender arms,
Those special few who listen to and understand her charms.

They’re wise enough to heed her when she warns her mood will change,
They feel it in the wind and prepare to meet her rage.

The seas may rise and lands may crack, great mountains torn apart,
Is this just natures balance or have we all played a part.

The greenies would have you believe its all because of us,
The businessmen and magnates well they say that’s all just fluff.

But I believe deep down inside and this is what I say,
We haven’t trodden lightly as we’ve journeyed on our way.

Like that evil creature of the night that bites and sucks your blood,
We’re drilling her for oil and it’s running like a flood.

We detonate explosives and we cut her open wide,
The reasons vary why we’ve taken this destructive ride.

We rape the seas and slaughter with no thought of whats to come,
We’re heading for some discipline and its going to come from mum.

She’ll teach us to respect her and those lessons can be hard,
And we had better listen not be glib and toss the card.

Its autumn’s midnight hour and the rain has ceased to fall,
But high above clouds gather as if waiting for her call.

We all can do our bit you know walk true along lifes path,
But remember love your mother and in her radiance you’ll bath…

By M Fawcett
April 2007

I’m not too sure you can still do this today in Toronto what with all the buildings and lights and stuff. It doesn’t seem to get cold enough for natural ice rinks anymore.

We used to dress up in our hockey gear at home. Some were more fortunate than others. They had shin pads and some guys even had real hockey pants. Then you’d take your old worn and chewed up skates and line ‘em up side by side and spear the blade of your stick through the opening of those tube blades that some players today only know from old hockey footage.

Then you’d sling the whole mess over your shoulders like Freddy the Freeloader from the Red Skelton show. You’d truck 10 or 20 blocks to a local park and slide down the hill to join the game in the open air natural rink that they made each winter. Sometimes you even took the bus. You were on a road trip. You’d put your skates on in the local building or outside the rectangular boards that surrounded the hockey rink. You just threw your boots somewhere near the boards and hoped you’d remember where you put them.

You never worried much about the puck not being frozen. Wait long enough and mother nature took care of that and a lot of your various body parts. The game would go much like it did in “You wanna’ play in or out? ” except now we’ve got blades on. And usually a lot more Johnnies show up. Fifteen a side, no problem. Nobody rides the bench. Most of the time we played under the lights and the only reason we would stop is that somebody would turn off the lights. Otherwise, nobody would know to stop. We all would have ended up being human popsicles.

Every so often the game would stop because the puck was getting stuck in the two or three inches of snow that we would build up on the not-so-even ice surface. Everyone would jam their sticks into the the nearest snowbank (another puck eater) and we would all start a new game—the human Zamboni. Everyone would find a shovel or the big scraper blades that the municipality would provide. Sometimes it took two Johnnies to push that big blade. We were all one team now.

And if we were really lucky, the local custodian would come out and give the surface a flood with a big fire hose. No problem, we just moved to the pleasure skating rink right next to the boarded rink. You had to jam your stick into the snowbank again because no sticks or pucks were allowed on that rink. You’d practice skating backwards where  most of us looked like stumbling giraffes and windmilling stuffed bears. Some guys wore way too much stuff.

And after a bit, we’d all assemble at the edge of the opening at the end of the boards where the big tractor could drive through and wait for the custodian to say “OK boys the ice is OK now.” I think he got to the second K before  he was surrounded by a whole bunch of Johnnies doing their warmup.

And then everybody would take a spot on the same teams we had before and two guys would be Davey Keon and Henri Richard. Another Johnny would act as temporary referee and get ready to drop the puck but either Davey or Henri would stand erect and say “Just a sec. I gotta’ shift my cup”. He’d dig down deep like a junior Al Bundy and take care of business and bend over centre ice. Johnny 3 would drop the puck and the game would continue.

And there would always be one bozo in the group that broke the golden rule—no raisies. He would say I was going for the top corner while the poor guy he just fired the frozen black thing into was rolling around in pain screaming “Ow Ow Ow” like some sort of vocal machine gun. There was no top corner. The posts were usually two of the rubber boots that were left on the outside of the boards.

It was always a guy who didn’t have shin pads on. The one’s we could afford always went flat because they more like pressed cardboad over felt.

And the one guy would apologize to the other and say “Sorry man, I won’t do that again. Are you OK. I didn’t mean it”. And the other guy would say “That’s OK, I’m much better now” Especially after both of them rubbed the wound to “make it better”.

And it would start all over again, but not until one guy says, you guessed it.

“Just a sec. I gotta’ shift my cup.”

I’ve got my fingers crossed.

The title is a reference to the great Sam Cooke song that I put high on my personal list of all time favourites. (Otis Redding’s version is also excellent). But it’s a wish I have as a Canadian watching this historic day in American and World History. A new sheriff will be signed in today.

I can honestly say I don’t know much about this Obama guy. But at dinner last night, my friend MW got this serious look on his face and started talking about him with a conviction that MW gets when you know he believes strongly in something. He’s a Canadian too but he’s really a humanitarian, as well. So I stopped talking and I listened a lot more. I have trouble with that. But I knew this was important to MW.

So I think I’m not going to pass judgement on another new political figure just yet. From what I can tell, he’s promised some interesting stuff to the American public and they have responded in kind with thier support. So the test begins. Will he cave and take the politically correct route, or as MW put it, will he just lie? Isn’t that what poitically correct really means? Not my question. MW said it but I agree.

I sure hope he doesn’t cave.

Mr. Obama seems to have a lot of soul and that’s not a reference to his skin colour. Why should that matter? I always wanted to take a trip from Toronto to Harlem in my youth and visit the great hall of music known as The Apollo Theater. But I always had this great fear of being perceived as a piece of white pocket lint amongst a sea of black-eyed peas. Shows you how smart I was back then. Not very.

But it was never a problem for me in Toronto. One of my best friends in my little hall of music, The Gogue Inn, was Bobby A. who had a skin tone similar to Mr. Obama’s. We didn’t care. Bobby used to borrow a copy of a fairly rare recording (at the time) by James Brown (Out Of Sight) so he could play it on his floor. His buddies liked to slide like James did it. Colin, the Irish guy, was pretty good at it.

The Gogue Inn had 3 levels and Bobby and I played records on our individual floors. When you left your floor and did your stint on guard duty on the back door, Bobby had the record stuffed down his pants like a second cup for a goaltender (maybe that’s where Dave Dryden got the idea for that one when I worked at Cooper). He was afraid that he might have to come to me and apologize for one of his friends getting a little selfish. The joy he always had was something I will find very to hard to forget.

And it was a special day when I ran into Bobby and his Dad on Yonge Street in Toronto and Bobby introduced me to his Dad as my friend John and the warmth would have lit up the department store where I was working at that time.

So maybe the American public will make new friends and introduce them to their dads and that Obama guy might have a lot to do with.

MW and I both agreed. We hope he is allowed to…