The Rantings of the barely human.
I love to see friends grow and do things they love, A long-time friend and fellow geek Tim has released his own mini board game.
Its a beautiful labour of love, as Tim says
The whole thing is essentially an art project for me, to see if I could do it. It is being sold at cost, not to make any money, and I am working on my next game.
Innsmouth Mystery is a ‘mint tin game’, which means a game that fits in a small tin. It has cards, dice, counters and meeples (the little figures).
you can get it from https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/innsmouth-mystery
Tim has done a playthrough guide
A phrase used when an issue or difficulty, suddenly resolves itself, with no explanation of what was done to resolve it and no indication of what caused the issue in the first place.
This may be maligning people, but this tends to happen in IT more than any other part of a corporation. A problem that’s been happening persistently or suddenly effects one part of the business, will suddenly miraculously start working often with the phrase, “oh, just try again”, and suddenly, the problem has gone away. No one is able to tell you what has been changed. It’s just fixed and there is always an overtone of “Well It’s working now. No point in chasing down the why”
In context, this phrase is often used on the next management meeting. and is a very sarcastic and corporate way of saying, “We don’t believe you. We know you’re lying to us. Tell us what you bloody fixed.” This desire isn’t just for witch hunting, but so that we know what to go looking for next time it breaks. Without a root cause these things just happen time and time again.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.
Very often managers, project leaders, or directors, just state “oh, we need to meet deadline X” when they are asking for an extra push from teams and seem to infer that just because a deadline exists that all other people regard that as in some way critical.
But I have found that spending five minutes of giving a decent explanation in your communications as to why you genuinely need it, and the end consequence you are trying to avoid by asking for extra effort works wonders, And by that I do not mean threatening “If action X does not get completed by the end of this week, then director Z will be mad”. 1
Show people valid business orientated consequence in a non threatening way. Ask for their assistance to solve a slightly more holistic problem. Don’t just demand, don’t just threaten. You can chase, you can cajole, but if you give people a good reason, then they will help you and understand why, doing it this way also aids them in providing answers as to why you are jumping the queue, If they have a good reason they can also use that to give to their boss to try and get extra resources for this kind of issue.
Ultimately, give people solid reasons, if your work is so important they should be easy to supply.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.
A situation inside a corporation where there is one point of interest which causes everyone to cluster in one place, ignoring all of the current essentials that require that their existing coverage be maintained.
This is a phrase heard at a security conference that quite gave me the giggles and in context, it means that if there is a large security incident or general outage, suddenly everybody in the corporation from network and security people to management, all suddenly cluster around this one issue, getting in each other’s way and not being efficient, just kicking at the problem without any plan. Everyone wants to be seen leaping to the most important thing, abandoning their current duties and leaving the space open for a more coordinated assault by competitors or bad agents.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.