Lev Lafayette's journal

Last Thursday gave Wordplay using the 'Fish Rain' Gloranthan scenarios from HeroQuest. As expected, the game ran extremely well and I must confess some preference for WP over HQ. On Sunday continued the now very long running RuneQuest Prax story, with the appearance of the Magus Artalen from the Strangers in Prax sourcebook. Tomorrow night will run a session of D&D3.5 for Ralis.

On Sunday gave the service for Dr. James Brown who spoke at the Unitarians on alternative energy. His approach was realistic, providing precise and contextually appropriate values for solar and wind power as well as their limitations. Afterwards ran a session for the Philosophy Forum (surprisingly very well attended) on the nature, cause and solutions to violence; the wide variation in social metrics indicating a heavy environmental rather than natural causes. It will dovetail very well with next month's discussion on Hannah Arendt. There was a degree of local context as a visitor to the Church assaulted an 83-year old congegation member a couple of weeks previous; I'm in the process of ensuring that said visitor never be allowed to step foot in the building again.

On Tuesday had two exams for my MBA; Marketing and Managing Information Systems. These are considered two of the more advanced subjects in the programme and sitting six hours of exams in one day is pretty heavy going. Nevertheless I am fairly sure I passed (probably with a Credit grade overall) and as such will be awarded a Graduate Certificate in Management. Next step is the Graduate Diploma and then the MBA itself.

Received my results for the first two units of my MBA, Financial Management and Management Perspectives; I passed both with Distinction grades. This was an enormous relief, especially for the Financial Management exam, which I thought was extremely difficult at the time. It also means that, assuming I complete Marketing and Information Systems, I will have a Graduate Certificate in Management (Technology Systems) by the end of next month. Then on to the Graduate Diploma. On a related angle, I have been given the necessary task of trying to make some sense of the internal wiki, external website and some of our marketing material. It doesn't make sense to pitch with generic marketing speak to scientists, for some well-known reasons, which have recently become evident at the Australian Synchrotron.

The events of Roman Polanksi's extradition for sexual assault have been long discussed. If you have the stomach for it, you can read the testimony of the young Samantha Geimer on the events themselves. When some members of the entertainment industry tried to defend Polanksi on the grounds of his international cultural reputation, most people responded to this with appropriate outrage. An unexpected angle however has come from the Sparticist League who have defended Polanski because Samantha was sexually experienced and had tried quaaludes previous. You can read the Sparticist League's position in the Communist Party of Great Britian newspaper in issue 794 and my response in 795.

Last week received results for my first two MBA assignments; Management Perspectives 67.5% (meh), Financial Management 88% (woot!). In the former, my marks were lower because I left out perspectives such as "Porter's Five Forces", the "McKinsey 7-S model" and so forth. If this sounds like management-babble that's because it is. I am somewhat horrified by how intellectually lightweight management theory actually is. There is a lot of influence from the latest popular psychology and material from actually practising managers who seem to owe their position more to luck, gender and school connections. In any case, exams are next week I've I've started putting together study notes from the course material. For my next two courses (and thus completing the Grad Cert level) I'll probably be taking Marketing (which should be a doddle with my background) and Managing Information Systems, which should be more challenging.

With the release of a playtester version of Rolemaster Cyradon I've been running scenarios with the three groups that I do regular face-to-face gaming with. Cyradon is pretty much generic fantasy, in many ways reminiscent of Rolemaster's old default game-world, ShadowWorld. That means there is a science-fantasy background in the distant past (thus one can integrate components of SpaceMaster), plus a reduced number from the standard set of fantasy 'races'; elves, dwarves, gnomes and lizard-men are all present. There is a group that physically resembles orcs, the gryx, but with a more peaceful outlook. Added to the mix are gryphons as potential PCs. The system is, well Rolemaster with some slight modifications, with both the benefits and problems of that game. Character generation still takes too long, the skill system is simple, combat is colourful with random deadliness, and the magic system certainly requires experienced players.

On Friday night went to an MS-Windows "7" (more marketing nonsense; it's actually NT v6.1.7) launch party (parody available) that was hosted at our work. A substantial number of our rusted-on pro-Linux systems team were present and, in all honesty, I cannot see any real advantages to Microsoft's latest release. Yes, it's better that Windows Vista, but that's hardly a great achievement. Big selling features supposedly include virtual folders, some user interface changes, and keyboard shortcuts - none of which are exactly great (or particularly new) improvements. It would be interesting to see if Windows 7 is still tied to DRM as its predecessor. Overall, there is no good reason to upgrade from Windows XP especially at the price tag that Windows "7" comes with; and I suspect the market will respond in kind.

I have become an MBA student! Specifically at the Chifley Business School, the programme in technological management is very sensibly designed, allowing one to complete a Graduate Certificate, Graduate Diploma and then Masters in succession. One of the matters pointed out at my last workplace performance review was that at some stage I'll have to choose between the management path and technical path. With postgraduate qualifications in technological management, at least I can become a manager and still justify having an interest in technical developments. Speaking of technology, which bank gets confused about some fairly trivial technical and security issues on their own helpdesk system?

Went with caseopaya, Meghan, Erin and Jenny to see AvenueQ at the Comedy Theatre, an adult version of Sesame Street. Not quite on the same scale of purile hilarity as Meet The Feebles, it still is memorable for the classic The Internet's For Porn (youtube). Appropriately we ate at Mrs. Parmas beforehand (amazing how many people don't get that old joke). Also have booked tickets to the performance Servant of the Revolution next month.

Following that tangent (see how my life links together?), have written article on Revolutionary Reformism as an appropriate strategy in liberal democratic states on isocracy.org which will be reprinted later this week on LeftFocus. One thing that should be mentioned here is that said strategy certainly isn't appropriate for countries where the pretence of democratic elections is clearly a sham (read: Iran), rather than supposedly due to "false consciousness", or other dubious claims of leftist elitism.

Have added a few more RPG items to the list for sale on Ebay; more coming soon.