I shaved on November 2nd, so I’m a day behind 
It’s only somewhat mo-like at the moment, primarily because I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do with it.
Mail, iCal, Snow Leopard and Exchange
I’ve been using iCal on Snow Leopard for about three months or so (I was on the pre-release program) as a replacement for Entourage. My company uses Microsoft Exchange for mail and calendar, and I thought it would be valuable to record my experiences with using Mail and iCal. I’d been using Entourage for both mail and calendar for over a year and had become somewhat frustrated by the unintuitive interface, so I was excited to be replacing it.
Setting up mail to work on Mail.app is very simple, assuming your Exchange server is correctly set up. Put in your e-mail address and password, and poof! it’s done. Calendaring on iCal set up must happen automatically as I don’t recall ever having to do anything there.
Mail has a somewhat frustrating keyboard shortcut for send (Cmd-Shift-D) compared to the Cmd-Enter of Entourage. That was my only real gripe, although I’ve been using Mail for long enough that this is really just a matter of retraining the fingers. Mail crashed and froze a couple of times importing all my e-mail from Exchange (I had about 20,000 messages, plus attachments) but eventually it got there. I can use the same security certificate to sign and encrypt e-mail as I did with Entourage, with no extra set up required, which was awesome. Typical mail use throughout the day is generally better, as the Mail app is more responsive and intuitive than Entourage, and integrates properly with all my other apps.
iCal however falls short in a lot of ways. Historically, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with iCal, primarily due to the months I spent writing SyncBridge, a failed app that was designed to fix a lot of the shortcomings of iCal. (Why did it fail? A buggy Apple API in Tiger (Sync Services, deprecated in Leopard) combined with Apple announcing their Calendar Server and me burning out trying to write the app while holding down a day job – I feel this historical context is important as I have no doubt it biases me). However, I was keen to give iCal the benefit of the doubt and I thought that surely anything would be better than Entourage.
The verdict? Well, it’s better in some ways and worse in others. Here’s the gripe list:
I cannot subscribe to any calendar other than my own. In organizations running Exchange, there are typically shared calendars that many users can read and write from – this is useful in things like event planning, team rota and so forth. I can’t access these at all from iCal.
iCal receives the click to highlight the window, and creates an event for me from that click, which I never intend – thus I waste time deleting the event.
All my events are the same colour. Yes, I can have multiple calendars and thus multiple colours, but as I said above I can only subscribe to my own calendar. Previously I would make things different colours so I could easily tell which meetings were regular recurrences that I’d booked versus stuff that my manager invited me to, versus stuff that someone not on my team invited me to, etc.
I can’t send any kind of message when I decline an event. This means I need to fire off an additional e-mail to say “Sorry, could you move this event forward an hour” or whatever. I also can’t accept or decline an event with sending a notification to the organizer (or the attendees when I’m the organizer). Not a big pain, until you discover that you also cannot cancel an edit. Yes, that’s right, if you edit an event and then decide that you don’t want to keep your changes – TOUGH LUCK! If you press Escape to close the editing window it asks you whether you want to send or go back to editing – no option to just throw away the edits! This was especially annoying when I made a change to meeting with 60 invitees that I didn’t need to send.
Also, I cannot update the meeting without also updating every attendee. This is annoying when I want to invite people to book the slot in their calendar, and then build up an agenda over time – I now need to keep the agenda separately, and fire an update just at the last minute.
Finally, forwarding an iCal invite requires a right-click. There is no menu option or context menu button or keyboard shortcut – you must right-click on the event and select “Mail Event”.
In summary then: Mail is an improvement on Entourage, iCal still needs a lot of work to come close to Entourage and Entourage is still short of Outlook. I know, I just said that a Microsoft app is a better than an Apple one. It’s true.
WatchTower State Coverage and the New England Team
This map shows all 50 states, and which WatchTower franchise(s) cover each state. Those states which are shaded with two colours have agreements with two franchises, and either will respond depending on availability.
The north-east used to be covered by the WatchTower New York, but a series of blunders a few years ago by the operatives at the time created a split. New England and DC created their own franchises and New York’s influence was reduced considerably and awarded to a different vendor (Jack White). New England’s franchise is owned by a consortium led by commercial real estate magnate, Chris Pfeiffer.
The current New England team (codenames and powers):
- Claymore – Can detonate objects remotely
- Silverhawk – Silver-armored fast flier
- Firewall – Fire generator and manipulator
- Nimbus – Weather controller
- Gemini – Creates replicas of herself
The two men on the team (Claymore and Firewall) are both capable of vast amounts of destruction. As a result, they have both loyal followers and loud detractors. To date, they have both sufficiently avoided any collateral damage that would result in the kind of bad publicity which shut down the New York franchise. Some say it’s only a matter of time …
Originally written for lategaming.com.
WatchTower Franchise Map
There are currently 10 WatchTower franchises in N. America, with a number of others under consideration by both WatchTower Inc. and various city and state governments. View WatchTower franchises on a map.
Each franchise has its own charter of specific responsibilities (primarily geographical) but in times of crisis, operatives from other franchises will help out. As can be seen on the map, many areas are without direct coverage. Exotic crime tends to be less common in these areas, and support for local law enforcement comes from both Fortress and on an ad-hoc basis from WatchTower (usually with a very hefty hourly fee).
Originally written for lategaming.com.
The X-1 visa
The late 80s and early 90s saw an upswing in exotic crime, as beleaguered WatchTower franchises were stretched trying to find members willing and able to combat this rising tide.
In response in 1994, Bill Clinton signed into law the Exotic Foreign Workers Act, which passed with slim majorities in both House and Senate. This law created a new visa, the X-1, which allowed foreign exotics to live and work in the United States on a two-year rolling term. This shored up the immediate needs at the time, and continues to allow WatchTower franchises to bolster their rosters in a hurry.
Some of the conditions of the visa include:
- Fortress screening (DNA samples, fingerprints, various scans – mechanical and exotic, etc.)
- Can only accept employment in a role in which their exotic abilities are needed
- Cannot apply for permanent residency
In return for these fairly stringent conditions, the application is processed fairly quickly (within about six weeks, which is lightning fast for the State Department).
Originally written for lategaming.com.
WatchTower – What Everyone Knows
The world is similar to the world we live in now. We have all the same political, social and environmental issues, the same level of media, technology and education, the same strip malls, gas guzzlers and sitcoms.
Origins
People with exotic powers first came to the public eye in the late 50s, with a series of highly publicized crimes perpetrated by someone who could turn themselves invisible. Although this person was never caught, a team of exotic crime-fighters, known as “The American Dream,” was formed to help the people of the United States feel safer at night.
There is still no satisfactory explanation as to the origin of exotic abilities. Roughly 1 in 100,000 people manifests some kind of unexplained ability, ranging from the fairly mundane (such as Martin R. from Dallas, Texas, who can instantly tell the gender of any animal and when it last procreated) to the awesomely destructive that had previously only been the stuff of legend.
WatchTower
Exotic crime rose as more and more super-powered people emerged. In response, some of the original members of The American Dream (with endorsement from then-president Lyndon B. Johnson, along with other political, commercial and popular support) founded an organization named the WatchTower, aimed at fighting crime across the United States.
It quickly became impossible to fight crime over such a vast area, and the WatchTower privatized and branched out into several franchises. Over time this became the de facto standard for cities and/or states to protect themselves against exotic crime. The WatchTower has since spread to the rest of the world, with franchises on every populated continent.
Fortress
Fortress formed at the same time as WatchTower’s privatization. For security’s sake, not much is known about this branch of the government. They detain exotic criminals and are often involved in their apprehension, sometimes working with (and sometimes against) WatchTower operatives. The world’s only known prison for exotic criminals is run by Fortress and it’s location is a closely guarded secret.
Originally written for lategaming.com.
WatchTower New England
All of New England is protected under one WatchTower franchise (WT-NE), which has offices in each of the state capitals (Boston, Hartford, Providence, Montpelier and Augusta) but is headquartered in Boston. To be precise, the HQ is in Cambridge, MA (want to see what it looks like?).
The satellite offices are primarily administrative, although each is known to have the supplies necessary to act as a base of operations for any given action being taken by WT operatives. At any given time, WT-NE employs around 200 people, and between 8 and 12 exotics.
Watch this space for WT-NE making news headlines …
Originally written for lategaming.com.
Back from hiatus – some new WatchTower
My move to Canada and subsequent birth of my daughter kind of put my gaming on hold, but now I’m back in a regular group and I’m looking to run a WatchTower game with them. This will be my first time doing a bunch of things:
- Running a supers game
- Running Marvel system
- Running WatchTower
- Running a game for this group
I’m using Marvel for the main reason as we used it in the past: it’s easy to pick up 🙂 It’s been ages since I’ve run anything: with the exception of a brief (and bland) Pendragon scenario in 2007, the last thing I ran was some D&D in 2004 when I was thinking of writing for WotC. Unlike Matt, I don’t have the plug-n-play-GM gene, so I’m intending to put a bunch of prep work into this.
Now all I need to do is switch to polyphasic sleep so I get an extra three or four hours in my day.
Originally written for lategaming.com.
Sideburns
I’ve decided to grow some sideburns, and dress up as Wolverine at Hallowe’en. I figure it’ll probably take three months to get them full-on enough. And I get to buy a cool leather jacket
Update: I discovered after three days that I no longer like having facial hair. After shaving pretty much every day for the last 9 or 10 months I’ve become accustomed to it. Whodathunkit?
15000 a year
After a year of working at my current job, I have received 15,000 emails. This doesn’t include any automated ones (which I delete), spam, etc. I don’t feel like I get a lot of email, so I worked it out:
365 - (2*52) - 10 = 251 working days per annum
15000 mails / 251 days =~ 60 per day
(8 * 60) minutes per day / 60 emails = 1 every 8 minutes
I wonder if that’s a lot? That doesn’t count personal e-mail, which is in a separate system. Anyone else get lots more? I remember getting a lot more in previous jobs, but it might have been a perception thing.