January 20, 2008: This Sunday Sunday Sunday

We slept in a little this morning but couldn’t sleep much as we have the weekend Dungeons and Dragons group getting back together at eleven this morning. We got up and did a little light cleaning and the apartment was still a disaster. We didn’t get it clean but we corrected the worst of the mess.

Ramona was over first. We couldn’t find Kevin and Pam for a while so Ramona and I walked down the stairs to go find them. It was the first time that I have taken the stairs in our building ever. I have never even seen the stairwells. Not that they are exciting or anything. It was a weird feeling, though, to walk all of the way to their apartment. It really helps you realize just how close we all live to each other. It really is just a matter of being several dozen feet away.

Today’s D&D session wasn’t very long. Just two to three hours. Kevin hardly got to actually play any of it because his character, David the Gnome (a bard), got knocked unconscious within the first few minutes and didn’t get revived until the last moment of the our session for the day.

At five thirty I walked over to the NorCrown Bank building and met Susan to help her move some furniture.  The big item was a heavy, old filing cabinet.  That proved to be a bit of work.  While I was there I got a tour of the new New Jersey Symphony Orchestra offices that are now located in the NorCrown Bank building right across the PSE&G Square from our apartment.  They have a nice new office space over there.

The real challenge was moving the filing cabinet up the three flights of very tight stairs from the street to Susan’s top floor apartment in Harrison.  That took quite a bit of work.  But we managed to do it without hitting the walls even once.  That was quite the accomplishment.

We drove back to Newark and picked up Dominica and then drove down to the Seabra Rodizio on Route 21 just north of Raymond.  It is a Spanish restaurant that we have been interested in trying for quite some time but never think of when we are actually looking for a place to go.

Dinner was good.  I ordered a casserole with seafood that I thought would be safe but ended up having a disgusting half lobster in it (an entire lobster just sawed in half) which was incredibly disturbing and almost made the food inedible.  Susan was nice enough to pull most of the meat out of the lobster for me as I just couldn’t eat the meat and have gone inside a dead lobster.  I need to remember that Spanish restaurants are not places where I can even consider getting any type of fish or seafood.  If it isn’t pure vegetarian then it is out of the question.  But all of the food was really good.

We came home and just relaxed.  It was pretty late by the time that we got home and Dominica has to go to work tomorrow.  Oreo got scared while we were gone, it being much later than our usual dinner time, and he had an accident in the hallway so we had to deal with that too.  The night was very short and Dominica pretty much went straight to bed.

January 19, 2008: A Day of D&D

We didn’t get to bed last night as early as we had hoped that we would. It wasn’t actually until after midnight but we just relaxed all evening and I definitely feel better having the biggest chunk of my homework done for the week and not having most of it hanging over my head this weekend when there are other things to do. And my main characters are up to level eight in the Bard’s Tale now too.

This morning I slept in until almost nine thirty. Our bedroom was quite a bit colder than usual and my joints were aching. Oh the joys of getting older. It was just forty-nine degrees in our bedroom when I checked the digital thermometer. We have a temperature clock in the living room. It has the atomic time as well as the temperature where it is located (middle of the living space) and a remote sensor in our bedroom. Very handy as those are the only two real separate zones of the house. The rest of the apartment was a comfortable seventy-two degrees. So I left the bedroom door open hoping that the warm air would spill in for Dominica.

Min got up around ten and set right to work cleaning around the apartment. There is a lot to be done today before people start arriving around one in the afternoon. At a quarter till eleven I ran over to Airlie Cafe and grabbed us a late breakfast.

After breakfast we cleaned together and got ready for everyone to come over.  Ramona arrived around one and Kevin and Pam arrived around two.  This will be Pam’s first time playing Dungeons & Dragons ever although her brother has played for a long time.

We played a good long day of D&D going from two until almost ten when we broke for about forty-five minutes so that everyone could run away and take care of a few things.  Then around eleven or a little before we got back together and played again until close to one in the morning.  The game is moving along a lot faster now that we are starting to get a hang of the rules and of playing together.  Having so many new players and playing with a new set of rules significantly different from the ones that we are used to has made it a lot tougher for the game to flow along.

When we broke for the evening everyone decided to try to get back together first thing tomorrow (read: around eleven) to continue playing for a little while.  Everyone has other things going on tomorrow too but there is a slot in the middle of the day when we can all get back together so we are going to try for that.

Overview of Measurable Organizational Value (MOV)

Measurable Organizational Value or MOV is a term coined by Jack Marchewka as an alternative tool to the more popular Return on Investment or ROI concept which has become a buzzword within the industry over the last ten years and has existed for many more. Marchewka defines measurable organizational value as being “the project’s overall goal and measure of success.”

Marchewka further breaks down the term MOV and says that it must implicitly include the following: be measurable, provide value to the organization, be agreed upon and be verifiable. Let’s look at each of these.

Measurability is obvious yet extremely difficult. Many benefits of IT projects are “soft” and inherently unmeasurable. For example, a project that makes employees more happy cannot be measured as it is never possible to determine how much happiness is the result of any one project and how much other organizational efficiencies can be attributed to employee happiness and morale. And yet we almost all agree that happy employees work better, are more loyal, cost less and interact better with each other.

The idea behind measurability is that no project decisions should be made without a consideration towards how they will affect the project’s MOV. If a new feature is being considered, for example, then that feature should be compared against the MOV. If the feature will not increase the MOV then it should not be included. A relatively straightforward concept, but it basically states that only measurable value should be considered. This is not always intuitive.

Project Management by MOV should provide value to the organization. This is the underpinning of the MOV concept and is analogous to the concept of ROI. ROI, however, is a measurement of the difference between expenditure and the expect value to the organization. MOV does not seem to take into account the cost of its own provisioning and only looks and the measurable business value after project completion while ROI takes into account the cost of providing the MOV as well as having the potential to consider the non-measurable organizational value which may be the driving force or a project.

A project MOV must be agreed upon. Marchewka states that all project stakeholders should agree upon the MOV of a project before the project starts. This requirement includes making business stakeholders as well as technology stakeholders, such as analysts and developers, agree to the MOV before a project begins as a later measurement of project success. This is a difficult task as it is in one group of stakeholders’ interest to make the MOV high while it is in the interest of the technology stakeholders to make it low. This is especially difficult as it benefits the business side to trick or take advantage of the lack of business acumen from the technology side and requires the technologist to allow themselves to be judges of something that they neither understand nor ultimately control.

Verifiability of the MOV is key. Since the project’s MOV is measurable by definition it must then be verifiable. After the project has been completed the MOV is to be verified to determine if the project was successful or if it was not. However, Marchewka does not seem to address the issues of ongoing organizational value. A typical IT project will deliver negative value up front and will increase in value over time and then, eventually, decrease in value until it is replaced. True MOV would not be verifiable until the end of its lifespan.

For example, since code from IBM’s System/360 project from 1964 is still widely in use one would assume that IBM has not yet been able to determine the final MOV for that project. If their initial estimates had been extremely accurate and had taken into account a lifespan that might even top fifty years then the MOV would not yet be able to be verified as having quite reached its full value. Therefore a useful MOV is one that takes into account an acceptable lifespan of measurement but this introduces many more factors.

January 18, 2008: Yay, a long weekend

Today’s Music: Mike and the Mechanics

We went to bed really early last night and yet I still didn’t wake up this morning until after Dominica had gotten up and had taken her shower. Oreo was being super ultra snuggly which didn’t help.

It was good that I overslept though as I really needed the sleep. I would have ended up being pretty useless today had I not gotten the extra sleep.

I checked my BlackBerry and was needed right away in the morning so had to get right to work but at least I got to sleep till the last possible second. The morning ended up being incredibly busy and I was just slammed with work right up until noon.

During my “lunch” I ran to Newark Penn Station and grabbed some pizza from Triponi and rushed into the office. Of course, once I raced to the office the rest of the afternoon proved to be incredibly slow. Even so, the afternoon seemed to pass by pretty quickly.

I continued my project of moving data from my email over to a database server. That is continuing to take a really long time. Have a process doing one month of data at a time running on my desktop at home and it is seeming to take approximately five hours of processing for each month of log data.

I did get a chance to play a little Bard’s Tale in the background while working on other things. That is one of the big upsides of the original Bard’s Tale is how easy it is to play casually while doing other things. You just run it in the background and hunt down the bad guys when you get a chance. Works great. Very relaxing.

Over her lunch break today Dominica ran out and got the oil changed on the Mazda PR5 and got some new windshield wipers installed as the old ones were getting to be a little bit dangerous. She also got a car wash while she was out getting everything else taken care of since it had some salt on it and it has been pretty warm recently so it was time to get that salt off of there before it became a problem.

The current situation with the car is that it is going to be waiting to be sold until March now instead of February which is good for us since we get to drive it through the entire winter and make at least one additional run with it between here and dad’s house sometime during that stretch. The person who is buying it wants to wait until their tax return comes in so that they can use that for a down payment on the car which makes sense for everyone involved. And it means an additional several weeks of not putting miles onto the BMW.

I worked later today than I thought that I was going to not leaving the office until around seven or so. Dominica cooked dinner while I was traveling home – vegetable casserole. My goal for tonight is to relax, play some Bard’s Tale, keep transferring email logs to the database and to do some work on my homework. I have a “take home” test that I need to do this weekend as well. But that shouldn’t be too bad.

Dominica spent the evening reading.  In addition to my other work I also rolled up a new paladin character for Pam to play in tomorrow’s Dungeons and Dragons game.  It is good that she is going to play as the other characters were having a hard enough time with the goblins with the four of them.  Having to drop to only three characters would have made the challenges quite a bit more, um, challenging.

January 17, 2008: Playing the Bard’s Tale

I didn’t end up having to work nearly as late last night as I had feared that I might have. By two in the morning I was getting ready to head off to bed. And additionally, the new Ruby email processing script is working and I was able to set it up to make a long run during the night. The only really unfortunate thing is that I am on the early shift this week and there is no way for me to have slept in today because I am covering early.

I was dragging pretty hard when I pulled myself out of bed this morning. But there was nothing to be done but to do it. I was working again quite early as there were people ready to use the servers that I had built last night first thing this morning. So right to work I went. I am so glad that today is my work from home day. I couldn’t possibly have handled being in the office.

The day actually went by pretty quickly considering what a struggle it was for me just to stay awake. Throughout the day, though, I started feeling sick and eventually realized that I had managed to run myself down while Dominica is horribly sick with a bad cold. So now I have a cold as well. Great.

I took a nap in the afternoon and that helped a little with my exhaustion but not much. I am definitely going to be going to bed early tonight.

While doing other things today I kept running my Ruby script in the background processing tens of thousands of email messages. I am really glad to get that stuff cleared out of there. I can’t believe how many emails were there. Nor can I believe how long this is taking to run.

The other day while we were playing Dungeons and Dragons, Kevin had shown the original Tales of the Unknown: The Bard’s Tale (a.k.a. Bard’s Tale I) on an Amiga emulator. That got me thinking about my old days of playing BT1 around 1987 to 1988. I loved that game back then when I had it on the original Commodore Amiga 1000. I recently bought a copy of the complete series for DOS (that is BT1-3 and the BT Construction Set.) So I decided that I needed to sit down and play it again.

I played the original Bard’s Tale on the Amiga at the height of my interest in video games around age eleven to thirteen. This game was by far one of my favourites and was the game that introduced me to the mechanics of role playing games. I would follow the Bard’s Tale with the Faery Tale Adventure and Pool of Radiance also on the Amiga. During the time that I played the Bard’s Tale the first time I had kept a log, a video game diary, that kept track of the time that I had spent on the game, when I played, what I did in the game, the plot, maps, etc. In many ways I suppose that that was the precursor to SGL since it was the only other time in my life that I really kept a journal for any length of time. Because I used that journal I still know that I spent over one hundred hours played BT! I also never managed to actually complete it. For some reason my copy of the game would not allow me to reach the final dungeon and even though my characters were massively powerful the game just wouldn’t let me finish it. So now I want to go back and beat the game for real and see the actual ending.

One of the first things that I noticed about playing the Bard’s Tale after all of these years is just how incredibly hard this game was to start playing. And today it is far easier as we can start and stop the game, restore saved files and more very quickly. But this game is still brutal to new players who might spend ten or fifteen minutes preparing to play and then die without ever getting to see any of the game at all.

What was amazing to me is how familiar the game is. It has been twenty years since I have sat down to play the Bard’s Tale and yet it feels like it was just yesterday. I can still walk around the city of Skara Brae, the setting of the game, and I know where every shop, temple, guild, etc. is located. It’s like I never stopped playing. Just a few minutes of a game like this just brings the memories flooding back.

I didn’t bother to leave the apartment at all today for food. I had cereal for breakfast and leftover Chinese take-away for lunch. I was originally supposed to have lunch with Susan today but she had to cancel. We are planning to see her on Sunday.

It was a quiet evening for us.  We were both so tired that we decided to just take it easy and relax.  Dominica started reading the third set of R. A. Salvatore’s Drizzt Cycle books and I played some Bard’s Tale and planned to turn in early.

Everyone decided today that we are all going to be around on Saturday so another Dungeons and Dragons session is scheduled for them.  So that is what we will be doing all afternoon.