Ape Man

The flesh of my thumb decided that it did not want to be associated with my thumb nail today. At least, not all along one side of the nail. The other side still seems happy to associated with it very own nail.

I am not sure what I did today to bring this state of affairs about. It does not strike me that I did anything today that would have caused this sad state of affairs to come about.

But now that it has, I am wondering about the best way to bring about a reconciliation. It does not appear that my past practice of prying at it and noting how cool it is that the separation goes all the way down to the base did anything to help matters.

So granting that it is a good idea to stop making it worse (now that it is starting to throb, this is not hard to do), I wonder what I should do to try to make it better.

My gut instinct is to lean towards neglect. That generally seems to work best for most injuries. But I have been told by people who ought to know that if I follow that course of action it is likely to get infected. Instead, I have been told that I ought to slather it up with antibiotics and put a band-aid around it.

Now I have read that antibiotics do more to retard healing then they do to promote it. So normally I am not inclined to this course of action. However, in this case I might try it out. The break between the two former partners just seems to be trying to get infected.

We will see how it goes.

Day flew right by today. I did not do much. But I spent a lot of it worrying about one thing or another. I only have two states, worried and bored. And of the two, I would rather be worried than bored.

No disasters happened today. That is a good thing. But not much really got done today either. Mostly it was just planing and figuring things out. The disasters are going to happen tomorrow. I just hope they are survivable.

Nothing we do should be irreversible. So I guess if it does not work, we should be able to undo what we have done. But I really hope it does not come to that. To many people seem to be hoping that it does not work for me to be happy with that outcome.

But I guess that is the wrong way of looking at it. I should not care one way or another what other people think. Caring about how other people are going to view things this is a weakness of mine that is common to humankind.

One has to admire those few people who seem truly unaffected by what other people think. But then, those other people rarely get anything done that they can’t do all by themselves. Most projects in this life require other people to bring to fruition. And when is in that situation, a little bit of regard for what other people think is necessary.

I was looking over blueprints and getting depressed today. I guess that just goes to show that nothing can make me happy right now.

I should have been happy. I was looking over the prints in preparation for the guys that are going to come up tomorrow and help me do what I want to do. And this is help that I did not expect to get.

I was so worried when I was nailing down the particulars of this project that they would not give me what they were promising me on the phone. So I contrived to get what I wanted out of them in writing to protect myself.

But apparently they are going to do way more then I expected. Even the problems thrown up by the failings on my side of things don’t seem to be deterring them. If this all pans out (and I am still not sure that I believe it) this whole thing will be easier then I expected. They will be doing a huge portion of the work for me.

Still, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed while I was looking at those prints. I kept finding problem after problem.

These problems don’t directly impact the current project. But they will nullify a lot of the gains that would otherwise come about.

Quick example: You have an area that contains a reception area with an office on either side. There are three zones involved in this area. One office is part of block of offices that belong to one zone and the other office is part of a different block of offices that has its own zone. The dividing line between these two blocks is the reception area which has its own zone.

No particular problem with all of that except that the space has been remodeled. Now all of the space is one big conference room and my preliminary survey leads me to believe that the room is still supplied by three different zones. And only one of the t-stats that control the space in located in the conference room. The other two t-stats are located at opposite sides of the building.

This creates problems. And what is worse, I don’t have any good answers.

Normally it is not a good thing to look a gift horse in the mouth. But when you get enough of them handed to you, they start eating you out of house and home. That is the situation I found myself in when I stated playing Medieval Total War II.

The people responsible for these white elephants is a shadowy organization known as the council of nobles. These unnamed dudes tell me what they want me to do and reward me for doing it. The problem is, they have a nasty habit of telling me to do what I want to do anyway and they reward me quite generously.

For example, they gave me three units of heavy cavalry for taking Wales. Similar largess followed just about every city that I took. They even rewarded me for re-taking cities that the French took from me. These rewards were not always heavy cavalry. Sometimes they were crap infantry units or cash. Still, they gave me enough heavy cavalry to bankrupt my fledgling economy and they did not give me enough infantry build a balanced army.

Now if I had understood how the game worked right from the get go, I would have had half the world conquered by now. But since I did not realize that there was no real penalty for sacking cities, I found myself in a fiscal hole that prevented me from becoming as powerful as I should have been given all this largess. The bad effects of my lack of understanding lingered on after I had finally figured things out.

Mostly because all my governors got corrupted in the process.

The thing that defines strategic problems is the tension between long term goals and short term goals. Without this tension, there would be no real difference between tactical problems and strategic problems.

In past Total War games, one of the most basic strategic problems was what to do with a captured city/province. In the short term, the best thing to do with the captured province would be to totally trash the place. You get a lot of money from doing that and inconvenient people tend to die off in the process. But in the long run, this would really set back the productive potential of whatever you took (unless their was no other way of keeping it from rebelling).

In the abstract, this is an easy decision to make. But when you are in a fight for your life, that extra shot of money could mean difference between having a long term future and not having one. It made for interesting choices if you could contrive to make the game difficult enough for yourself.

I am using the past tense because that trade off does not seem to be in effect in Medieval Total War II. I have not played the game enough to be sure, but it seems as if there is never a good reason not to sack a city in the new game. The damage you do is minimal and the rewards are great.

This is why it may have made sense for Spain to try to take Wales with a crap army. They had not hope of keeping it. But the payoff would have more then paid for the army and fleet that carried them there. It is possible they were just trolling along the coast looking for easy pickings. And Wales would have fit the bill perfectly if it where not for the heavy cavalry going to Wales to retrain. But I don’t think the Spanish boats could see that they were coming.

And the method by which I came into possession of such a large army of heavy cavalry so early in the game is another thing the threw my strategic calculations off.

The fact that Spain decided to try to invade Wales was one of the most surprising things that happened in my brief time spent playing Medieval Total War II. I was not expecting anybody to try to do that.

And that is all to the good. I like it when I can’t predict everything the computer is going to do.

Unfortunately, one of the reasons that the move surprised me is that it did not make any sense. Spain had no border with me. They could not hope to support the army. Moreover, the army seemed too small to be worth all the effort they put into getting it up there. If memory serves me correctly, it was a family member, a couple of units of light horse, a unit of crossbow men, and maybe a crap unit of light infantry or two (my memory on the last bit is a little hazy. They all died whoever they were).

This is not the type of army to make you panic when it lands behind your lines. And when you happen to be sending 4 units of heavy horse back for retraining and you have a few family members kicking around it becomes a massacre.

So you have to wonder what Spain was thinking. Most likely the answer is that there was no good reason behind what Spain did. I am inclined to this theory because I have already witnessed the AI making a number of choices that were really stupid even for a computer.

The most disgusting one was the behavior of Scotland. They spent their entire existence as a nation with an army camped outside of York staring wistfully at it (and I mean they were right outside York. Medieval Total War II seems to let you walk all over other people’s territory without triggering war. They don’t even tell you to get off and you can’t seem to tell them to get off. This creates all sorts of interesting situations). In spite of having an army camped on my land, Scotland was not in a state of war with me and they never entered one (until I wiped them out in two turns).

This would be bad enough as it was. But they never took the rebel province that was directly to their north. And they could have easily taken it with the army they had outside York.

France seems to have a similar blind spot. I know of at least one rebel province that France still has not taken.

This disgusts me. How hard is it to write an algorithm that has the computer AI prioritize picking up the easy fruit? France had plenty of time to take all rebel provinces before they back-stabbed me. Scotland could have taken the rebel province to the north and still had plenty of time to stare wistfully at York.

But having said all that, it is possible that Spain made an intelligent decision to try to take Wales with a crap army. And the reason it may have made an intelligent decision is because Medieval Total War II has some surprising departures from the normal ways of doing things in the Total War universe.

Strategic calculations that made sense in every Total War game up to this point, no longer seem to make sense. I am unsure if this a good thing or a bad thing.

So I did what I have a bad habit of doing this time of year. I bought a computer game. In this case, I bought the gold edition of Medieval Total War II for about $11.

It’s a little different than what I expected. I have not played it enough to be sure if this is a good thing or bad thing. To be honest, I have not played it enough to figure out what is going on.

I started the game on a day when I didn’t feel like thinking much. My plan was to play as England and unlock the game and play the cooler (harder) factions at a later date. Since I wanted to learn the game, I did not set the difficulty levels all the way up. I think I have it at next to highest level for tactical level combat and one level below that for the strategic game. I figured that with this easy set-up, I would be well on my way to winning the game in the time available.

It didn’t work out that way. It took me a lot longer than expected just to take England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. As far as mainland Europe is concerned, I only have one more province than I started out the game with. And it remains to be seen how long that will last.

Normally, this would be an unreservedly good thing. But in this case, I am not sure how much of my difficulties stem from improvements in the AI and how much it stems from the fact that I just don’t understand the game yet.

One undoubted highlight….

The A.I takes cities.

Example: France sent multiple armies against my provinces in France when they back-stabbed me. These armies were not that strong. But they were strong enough to overwhelm the weak garrisons I had guarding the areas. I was relying on my uber-stack to beat back the hordes. But this did not work so well against a multi-pronged attack because the French did not wait around to starve me out. Instead, they kicked down the doors as soon as they built the necessary equipment. So by the time my uber-stack got there, it was going to have to be a siege operation.

And of course, there was that spy that opened the gates for the Germans when I was counting on them having to take at least one turn building siege equipment.

And then Spain invaded Wales.

Among other things that happened to me last week, I found out that a vendor was going to do a lot more work for me than I had thought (I am speaking of a project at work). Normally, this would be a good thing. But it was one more thing that made me depressed last week.

The problem is that in order to take advantage of the extra work the vendor is going to do, I need to get things together on our end. But getting things together on our end means working with other people. And no else except one other guy wants to work on this project.

Now this should not be a problem. People have to do things they don’t want to do all the time. That is why it is work and not play. And really, I don’t think the people I need to help me have that strong of feelings about it. But my boss does not want to get anyone upset. All too often, not getting anyone upset is the governing reason behind what he does. That is why he is the nice guy and I am not. But it is not entirely up to him to make that call.

For various political reasons, I have to work closely with the boss of my boss’s boss on this project. And by that, I mean he has to give his personal approval to how we are going to do certain things when the time comes. He is the type of person who will want to get everything we can out of the vendors. If that means throwing a few more guys on the project for a couple of days, then so be it. He will have no problem telling my boss that either.

And then my boss will turn to me and say “this is not what I had in mind.” He already said that to me half a dozen times last week. I expect that I will be really tired of hearing that before it is all done.

But it should not bother me. The fact that it was getting me down just shows what a baby I have been the last couple of months. I knew it was going to be like this right from day one. I know how to play the game and I know what the rules are. I can’t say I have not been warned. And I have gone through similar problems a number of times without getting too bothered.

But I am just getting sick of it.

How come nobody told me about this? Maybe they did and I just forgot. But you would think I would remember something this cool.

Anyway, I don’t have a lot of room to complain about people not telling me about things. While I have been spending my time on this blog whining and trying to pretend that I am not, other things have been happening. And those things will probably interest people more than my whining.

For one thing, one of my co-workers lost just about everything in a house fire.

It was one of those things that come out of nowhere and blind side you. I had just come back from taking care of a minor problem and I needed to discuss some issues with my boss. But before I could say a word, he spilled out his tale of woe. To wit, my boss had received a call saying my co-worker’s house was on fire. My boss felt that he needed to pass that message along to my co-worker, but my boss did not know where my co-worker was nor was he responding to pages.

So naturally I took off looking for him. I generally know where people are better then my boss does. But I could not find him and it began to worry me. Finally, I found some people who told me that my co-worker had been picked up by his brother and was already on his way to his burning house.

My first thought upon hearing this was to call my boss and let him know so that he would not worry. Come to find out, my co-worker’s brother had already called my boss to let him know that he had picked up my co-worker. Somehow though, it had not occurred to my boss to pass that information on to me.

It’s not like I am a hard guy to get a hold of. I have both a cell phone and pager. And I don’t really like running around looking for a guy who already has the information that I am desperately trying to get to him.

But not withstanding his loss, my co-worker should be all right. He has insurance and he has more friends and relatives then I could keep track of without a spreadsheet. And he seems to be taking everything in stride.

I would love to help him personally, but I doubt I will be given the chance. Too many other people already in line to do their good deed for the year.

The whole week was like this for me. I had all kinds of surprises come from out of the blue. None of them were as bad as the surprise of my co-worker’s fire. But they all seemed to depress me. And for no reason.

A while back, I was called back into work after working all day long. I stayed until a little past midnight. I was back home and in bed by 1:30 a.m and I was up at 6:00 a.m and back to work by 7:30 a.m. After that, I did not go home for another 36 hours. I got about four hours of sleep at the job site, but the rest of the time was spent working.

And by working, I mean shoveling snow and spreading salt using a five gallon bucket. I was not senior enough to use any of the machinery even though no one else worked as many hours as I did.

Now, I was young and healthy. But after all of that, I almost fell asleep on the way home and I did not have much strength left in my body.

These days, one of my jobs is to photocopy various documents and put them into binders for regulatory reasons. And I get paid a lot more to do it than I did when I was shoveling snow and it does not take much of my time.

Now, which of these two things do you think was more appreciated?

Just the other day my boss was thanking me effusively for photocopying the various documents and putting them in binders. He does that quite often. My boss’s boss has thanked me for doing the job. Even the boss of my boss’s boss notices the work I do photocopying things.

But as for that long day and many other days like them, no one really noticed or cared. I was just a piece of scum there to do work that nobody else wanted to do. I stayed there long after the other people who had been plowing, as opposed to shoveling, left. I stayed because I was told I had to clear certain emergency exits before I could leave because of health and safety reasons. The bosses that told me I had to do this left after they told me I had to this.

To be fair, I don’t think they really cared if I did it or not. They just wanted to be able to say “I told Ape Man to clear those areas.” I was just dumb enough to do as I was told. And nobody bothered to thank me. Not on that job or the many others like it.

But which do you think I am more proud of? Photocopying things or shoveling snow?