A truly excellent quote
I was reading an article today about why pissing people off is not necessarily a bad thing in a company and almost a necessity for good management and I stumbled upon a quote from Colin Powell.
Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your actions and decisions. It’s inevitable, if you’re honorable. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity: you’ll avoid the tough decisions, you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted, and you’ll avoid offering differential rewards based on differential performance because some people might get upset.
Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult choices, by trying not to get anyone mad, and by treating everyone equally “nicely” regardless of their contributions, you’ll simply ensure that the only people you’ll wind up angering are the most creative and productive people in the organization.
I think it’s one of the best things I’ve read in a long time, and something anyone who’s managing projects and people should read and really understand.
Pirated vs Purchased
I will admit I do “borrow” some films off the net – to see what they’re like – if I’m skeptical. The stuff I know will be good I see at the cinema
But anything I think was good I buy on DVD – and I have nearly 500 of them now
It is annoying though that a lot of the time watching a film on DVD is a lot more annoying than watching an “illegal” download…
I’ve just put “never back down” on – which is a personal favourite of mine – and compared the download to the dvd
Download
Click on the film on my apple tv – it plays
DVD
Sit through an advert for some shite looking B rated horror flick.
Sit through another advert for some chick flick
Sit through an advert for red bull (seriously WTF)
Choose play from menu – it plays
I got a similar experience with House M.D
I love that show so much I spent £80 on a box set of all series
But with the box set I have to sit through a load of bloody “pirate dvd’s are illegal” adverts that I can’t skip – before watching the show. Ironically on my downloaded versions I can just watch it without that hassle
Why can’t the film and music industry realise that more people would pay for stuff if they didn’t fill the discs up with crappy adverts for films that we don’t care about?
COD:MW2 – boosting & sniper rifles
First of all let me just say I think the Modern Warfare games are superb. I played the original for 18months on and off and never got bored of it, and I’m now fairly hooked on MW2. Whenever I get a free weekend that’s what I’m doing.
I bought battlefield Bad Company 2 – but how anyone can say that’s a better game is beyond me. The single player campaign is a joke, enemies just appear from fresh air in front of you, and several of the maps you can just run down the side all the way to the end without ever shooting anyone! The battlfield fans (and I used to be one – BF1942 on PC was awesome in its day) will tell you it’s superior because of the environment damage. I’m sorry but it’s clearly not. Yes you can shoot a telegraph pole down, but then if you run at it you can kick it along the floor like it’s fresh air – it never really feels like you’re actually in the game 
But anyway, moving on – I mostly love the COD:Modern Warfare series – but in MW2 there are 2 major problems which are nearly making the game unplayable
BOOSTING
Not 5 minutes goes by these days without getting a message from someone I don’t know saying “FREE 4 ALL BOOSTIN ASK 4 INVITE”, which is frustrating, but worst of all it is very VERY rare that you can play a free for all game without finding 2 people in a remote area of a map shooting each other.
For those who haven’t come across this (you must have had your head buried pretty deep in the sand for the last 6 months) it involves 2 friends joining the same free for all map and boosting your score using tactical insertion.
One person puts a tactical insertion down and the other person then shoots them in the head, when the first person respawns they put another tactical insertion down and get shot in the head again. Repeat this as you work through your killstreak (helicopters, ac130, then finally a NUKE) and you get a load of points and finish 30 for 0.
What a fucking stupid thing for the game developers to allow!! Also how retarded do you have to be to think spending 3 hours shooting the same person over and over in the face just to get to rank 70 prestige 10 is a fun way to spend your spare time?? Arggghhh!!
Sniper Rifle Scope Bug
The sniper rifles are good in MW2 – very good. You have to hold your breath for a steady aim (unlike battlefield) and the scopes are quite realistic. HOWEVER a massive bug makes them get completely misused.
If you pull the left trigger to go to a scoped view – but halfway through the gun coming up to your eye you then pull the right trigger to shoot – it will 99% of the time kill whoever is in front of you, regardless of if you’re actually aiming at them or not. Which means people use sniper rifles for single shot kills from the hip.
How utterly stupid is that bug? I’m 99% sure people don’t run around in real life with .50 cal sniper rifles rapid firing them from the hip or halfway up to their eye..
Every search and destroy game I play is ruined by the sound of 15 snipers all firing rapidly across the map!
Rant over
Necessity Vs Abuse
Stood in Netto buying my budget 99p sandwich for lunch (It’s payday on Friday – I’m always broke this week – You’ll get the irony soon!).. I noticed the newspapers today talking about the government introducing new Eco Tax’s.
I’m going to skirt around the issue that global warming is nothing more than a media-produced reason for governments to earn more money – that’s a post for another day.
What really has p*ssed me off is who they are targeting with their new eco tax, like you couldn’t guess. Motorists and home owners.
Proposals to introduce a tax on people who use too much electricity/gas – and triple the fuel tax for everyone.
Why the hell don’t these consultants understand the simple difference between Necessity and Abuse.
Owning a 4×4 landrover and only using it to take the kids to school at 12mpg is abuse.
Owning a family sized car and using it to get to work and back is Necessity.
The UK has an APPAULING public transport network. A bus from my house to the local town takes 1.5hrs – it takes 25minutes by car.
A train to my local town costs a little over £8 – it’s about £4 in unleaded in my car. And the trains stop running if a leaf hits a track which is dead handy if you’re going to a job interview or actually want to be on time for anything ever.
For my girlfriend to go home to Wales to see her parents – its either 3 comfy hours with some music in her car, or 4 different trains where the changes are mostly sitting around in a town center train station surrounded by drunken football supporters on her own!
I don’t get in my car every morning because I enjoy sitting at 40mph all the way to work behind the 92 year old who can’t see over her dashboard. I don’t enjoy dodging the giant potholes in the UK road network. I don’t enjoy any part of my drive to work. But I have to do it or I wouldn’t have a job – it’s that simple!
I don’t enjoy having a house – it offers me virtually no pleasure at all. But sleeping on the pavement is a little inconvenient.
It’s just much much easier to tax people on things they can’t avoid doing and then when they complain tell them its their own fault because if we walked to work every day and didn’t use any central heating in winter we could avoid the tax.. utter joke
Everyone has to work, everyone has to provide a place for their family to live. All of that currently involves burning fossil fuels – which are running out. But until alternatives are provided its necessary. Yes that means the earth is slowly dying, yes that means the human race is doing a pretty good job of killing itself, no that’s not necessarily a bad thing!
Thinking for a 5 year plan for myself – the way the UK is going there’s only 2 sensible options.
Move to another country .. or .. quit my job, sit in a house paid for by the government, heating on full, with a couple of screaming kids running about the place and claim benefits to spend on vodka like all the other people my age do..
Well done Labour.. well done
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